One By One
by Arty Thrip - Alpha 04
Summary: Nobody can remember what happened to the Hero of Kvatch after the Oblivion Crisis. It has been ten years and it is as if she never existed. But Kvatch never forgot its saviour, and they will find out what happened to her, no matter where it takes them. Standalone sequel to Brothers in Arms
1. Aden

_Author Note: This is an unofficial sequel to Brothers in Arms. That is to say, it follows BiA chronologically and in the same universe, but reading BiA should not be essential if you wish to read this one._

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><p><em><span>Chapter 1<span>_

"Right. Left. Left. Left. Right. Up. Right. Right. Down. Behind. Right. Right. Left. Right..."

"_Bastard!_" He chucked his wooden sword to the ground and stuffed his left fist in his mouth as an angry red welt was beginning to show across his knuckles. "Oo thed wight..."

"Now now Aden," his aunt scolded him, shaking her head. "There's no need to insult your kin, is there?" She rubbed his cheek with a thumb affectionately and laughed. "You see with your eyes, not your ears." Chucking her own wooden sword into a pile behind her, she observed her nephew closely. "You should go and see Oleta with that, you know."

Aden nodded, his hand still firmly lodged in his mouth. "Fankth," he muttered around his fist, walking past the woman with as much dignity as he could manage. She would be laughing at him as soon as he turned the corner; he knew that much.

Still, he couldn't think badly of her however hard he tried and however much his hand hurt. It wasn't the first lash she had given him, but it was certainly one of the worst – or at least it felt like it right now. She had taken him in some ten years past, the day that his mother, her sister, had been slaughtered like a lamb by the daedra as they sacked the city. His Aunt Tierra was still a guardswoman though, and would be until her dying breath, so even if it meant teaching her last surviving relative a harsh lesson she would do it without a second thought.

As hard as Aden thought, he couldn't remember what Kvatch had looked like before the daedra had come. He had seen only nine winters when the flames had come and taken away almost everything that he had ever known; the city still wore its scars proudly: the walls and the castle were still scorched and blackened from where the fires had touched them, and every here and there a house that had only been partially destroyed remained standing and had only been touched up during the great restoration.

Nobody forgot the daedra though.

When he lay down the sleep, the Redguard saw them in his dreams with their scarlet-and-ebony skin and their swords as long as he was tall, and the gnashing teeth and slashing claws, and fire. Everywhere was fire.

And Aden had got off lightly.

He had lost both his parents in the very first wave of daedra, but he himself had been tucked up in the chapel with his aunt and the man who would become Emperor and save them eventually. Some people lost everything. Their families, homes, possessions were all gone now, burnt to dust and blown away by the wind, leached by the rain. Some people had come away so traumatised that they had left at the first opportunity; a few had taken their own lives in anguish. The outward scars had faded long ago, but the internal wounds would never heal, no matter how long they waited. Some still didn't eat well; some still couldn't sleep without potions; some still didn't talk.

But the city was thriving. Aden couldn't remember what it had been like before, but his aunt had assured him that now it was better. The people of Kvatch had banded together and rebuilt their town brick by brick and plank by plank. The Mages and Fighters Guilds had returned about four years ago, re-establishing themselves quickly among the population and taking in all the people who had watched helplessly as their friends and relatives had been slaughtered. Kvatch Arena had not been rebuilt fully, but a training ground had been created in its place and it was frequented daily by a whole range of people.

Oleta lived next to it. The town's healer had been invaluable to them ever since the sacking of their city. She had patched them up, helped them sleep, and offered her advice. There was a reason that she was regarded at the best healer in the whole province.

Aden knocked on her door tentatively and slipped inside when she called an answer. Her home was a simple place with one bed and one desk and one cupboard. The boy had visited this single room more times than he would ever admit as he had grown up.

"Are you alright?" the woman asked him, looking up from the place where she was grinding some herbs in a mortar and pestle. Even after all this time she still dressed shabbily in a faded brown tunic and worn felt shoes that hung off her angular body like a tent until she tied them tightly with some simple string.

The would-be warrior wanted to nod and tell her that he had turned up only to have her counsel, but the fact that his knuckles were still lodged in his mouth rather gave him away. He extracted them and presented the wound to the ex-priestess. A raised red welt ran across three of his fingers and was surrounded by dark black bruises.

"Training with your aunt again?" Oleta chuckled, rising and looking in her cupboard for a remedy.

Aden flushed in embarrassment. "Umm... Yeah," he admitted, grimacing when she pressed a poultice against his swollen fingers.

"There's no shame in it," she told him, muttering a few Ayleid words of healing that rushed through his digits with a surreal cooling sensation. "Tierra has been a guard for almost two decades now, and she is one of the finest swords we have in this city. You can hardly expect her to go easy on you just because you are her nephew." Removing the bandage, she inspected the wound. "Ah, I see..." she muttered. "Looks like you've fractured one of your fingers." She tapped his swollen middle finger gently and he winced in pain. "It's fine. I can fix it," she promised, dousing it in the appropriate magicka. It took the swelling down, but the dark bruises remained prominent against his brown skin. "Now, its fine, but you're going to have to let it heal for a couple of weeks. So no more sword-fighting for you, I'm afraid."

The boy frowned. "What am I supposed to do then?" he asked. He had spent years doing little other than practicing his swordsmanship.

Oleta tapped him on the shoulder comfortingly. "You'll find something. When you were younger you were something of an artist, if I recall correctly."

"Yes, but that was _before_." He didn't need to say before what. Everybody knew what he was talking about.

"You'll find something," she reassured him.

He nodded mournfully and tracked back to the door. "Thanks for fixing up my finger," he muttered, pulling it open and stepping outside. He let it shut behind him under its own steam.

Sighing heavily, Aden walked away from the small house and gazed longingly at the training ground where two small boys were sparring. They had been born after the sacking and their innocence showed in the way that they played at being soldiers. Nobody who remembered treated it like a game; it was still life or death for them, even ten years on.

He grimaced and stared hatefully at his finger, spinning on his heels and trudging back through the streets towards the main square. Everywhere he looked there were memorials; the small council that led the city after its count had died had put a plaque to commemorate every single dead citizen into the ground around a statue of Martin Septim that they had erected after they had discovered what had become of the man who had once been their priest. There wasn't a single speck of earth visible now for the amount of brass and bronze and green copper that covered the area all the way across and most of the distance from the chapel to the main gate. It made his heart sink to look at them.

Finding his parents' plaques was easy. He visited them almost every day now, and had grown to know the area like the back of his hand. Sitting, he ran his hands other the engravings slowly, wiping off the mud from the boot prints of people who marched up and down all day: the guards, the guildsmen, the merchants...

Aden couldn't remember his parents. He was ashamed of that fact, but that didn't make it any less true. Nine years he had been with them, and ten years without them, and now they were little more than memories and dreams. Fractured memories and dreams.

"You alright?" a voice from behind him asked. It belonged to a Nord girl who had moved into the city with her father a little over a year after Kvatch had been sacked; he had moved on, but she had stayed behind on her own, staying in a small shack near the city walls and eventually moving into the Kvatch Mages Guild when it opened.

He looked up. "Fractured my finger," he murmured, showing her the blackened digit.

"Oh, that's _nothing_," she told him, strolling around into his line of sight and sitting cross-legged opposite him. "I managed to turn my hair pink today." She pulled back the green hood she was wearing to reveal brilliant cerise-coloured hair before hastily covering it back up again. "Alteration week at the Guild," she explained. "Spell went wrong, and no matter how many times I cast Dispel it never seems to fade." To prove her point, she cast the spell then and there.

Aden chuckled. "Only you, Finny," he admitted, almost forgetting about his injury. "I'm sure it will fade eventually. What were you aiming for?"

"Red," the Nord grinned. She was younger than he was, but only by about a year. It showed. She could be terribly childish sometimes, though Aden put that down to the fact that she had never lived through the Sack of Kvatch. "Now I just look stupid."

"It's not _that_ bad," he lied. As if hot pink hair was normal. "But," he laughed. "I'd keep that hood up when you're out in public. Some of the people around here will think you're a lunatic if they see you like that."

"They wouldn't be _totally_ wrong," she sniggered. "But look, perk up about your finger, yeah? I mean, it's only a fracture. Have you seen Oleta?"

He nodded. "I'm not allowed to train with my aunt for two weeks."

"Shame..."

"I'll live."

"You'd better! I'd get bored in this place without you!"

Aden snorted. "Kolfinna Ice-Heart, you flatter me," he smirked.

"I try." She mocked a bow and scrambled to her feet. "Now, there is no use moping about on these depressing old plaques... Come on," she said, offering him a hand. He took it gratefully and the Nord girl hauled him to his feet. "I know it's a cliché and all, but your parents wouldn't want you sitting around here all the time... And there are plenty of things to do besides whack people with swords! Look at me!"

He did look, but when one took into account the fact that she was wearing her Apprentice robes from head to toe there was not a great deal to see save blue eyes so pale that they were almost blank and a snowy white complexion as though she had never seen a day of sunlight in her life. She was shorter than he was too, but not so much that she had to look up to see him.

"I mean, I've never touched a sword in my life," she went on merrily despite his looks. "Well, I have, to like... move one around, but not to use it."

"Well, not everyone has magicka, Finny!" the Redguard chuckled. He didn't have one iota of magic in him, no matter how hard he looked for it. "Some of us have no choice but to hit each other with sticks!"

"Uncivilised savages," she muttered in jest, leading him away from his parents' only resting place. They had not had enough room on the plateau that the city rested on to bury all the bodies; most of them had been burnt. "What do you do all day other than train?"

He shrugged. "Not much. Nothing worth reporting anyway."

"I don't know what you think you're training to fight," Kolfinna sighed. "There hasn't been a war on in ten years, and the anarchy has nothing to do with you. You've never even _been_ to the Imperial City!"

"I don't expect you to understand. You weren't _there_."

"Aden." She grabbed his shoulders and looked him straight in the eyes, causing him to shift uncomfortably. "They are never coming back. They never have, and they never can. They're gone. You're training to fight a banished enemy."

"You wouldn't understand..."

"Maybe not, but you know I'm right."

Aden raised an eyebrow. "Infuriatingly so," he growled. He had to try hard to stop himself grinding his teeth. "Though it doesn't do any harm to be prepared, does it?"

"And you're right too." The Nord shot him a grin. "Now let's go somewhere..."

"But _where_? There's nowhere in this city that we've not been before. It's not like we'll be making some intriguing discovery..." He paused and then chuckled. "You know what? I think I worked out why your hair went pink instead of red..."

Finny smirked. "Pray, tell."

"Well, your hair is white normally, isn't it?" It was, largely, though she would argue that it was blonde. Everything about the girl was white, so white she could have been the child of a man built of snow. Aden had seen her father, and he had been a dark man, pale of skin but with a shock of almost black hair and deep brown eyes. She was something of an anomaly, it seemed. Maybe that was why he had left her behind. _His loss_. "And what happens when you mix red and white together?"

She laughed, a strange sound somewhere between snorting and hyperventilating. "You get pink." Squinting up ahead and then down at her feet, she sighed. "I must look _so_ strange right now. I'm virtually white, wearing dark green robes and having violent pink hair... Hopefully it'll wear off."

"I think you look equally weird with that hood up," he jested with her. "Well, no more weird than usual."

She punched him in the arm. "You're an arse, Aden, you know that?"

"And that's why you love me."

They both went into a fit of hysterics as they walked around the chapel. The streets had been repaved after the battle; there was a time a decade ago when just walking in the city was like wading through a knee-deep swamp of mud. Now the paving slabs were large and mostly flat, already pounded down by the endless comings and goings of hundreds of feet. To say that the city was thriving again would be wrong – though nowhere had really _thrived_ during the ten year anarchy following the end of the Oblivion Crisis – but at least it was not limping along on the donations of Count Hassildor and Countess Umbranox. The ash had made the lands around Kvatch fertile, though not as fertile as the West Weald, and they had started trading in grain when they had managed to fill their own granaries once more. It wasn't much, but it tided them over.

The forge had been rebuilt, but had remained behind the chapel where it had sprung up after the Sack of Kvatch. Aden remembered gathering scrap metal from the ruins for Batul gra-Sharob to create new joints for buildings almost vividly. He had been shorter back then, and his hair had been almost constantly in a perfect afro as he ran up and down the streets with all the energy of a small boy. These days he braided his hair to keep it out of his eyes when he trained, and he had bulked up considerably through a semi-decent diet and working out daily.

"Do you remember when we were small?" Finny was saying as she looked down at the old shack that she had lived in on her own for years before somebody noticed.

Aden remembered almost everything, but there was quite a lot that he was trying to forget. He nodded. "People thought you were a ghost before they got to know you... Or I did... You were so pale... You still are."

"I know." Her eyes sparkled a little. "I remember you barging into a house with a wooden sword trying to rid the city of the ghost in order to save... Some fair maiden, or something..."

"We have ghosts enough in this town," he sighed. "We didn't need more." He smiled at the memory though. "It was a good thing I _did_ hit your finger though."

The Nord agreed. She mocked his voice from when he had been so much smaller, a pitiful impression that was several octaves higher than he could recall himself ever being. "_Ghosts don't bleed_."

He would have teased her back if his voice hadn't broken and stopped him from speaking in such a high pitched tone. "I'm pretty sure I didn't sound like that, Finn."

She chuckled. "I was there. I _know_ you did." They sat beneath the statue of Antus Pinder. "You know..." She started, but trailed off squinting into space. Her eyesight was notoriously poor.

"I know what?"

Finny almost jumped out of her skin. Eventually she regained her composure. "I was reading the other day... About the Oblivion Crisis in the Guild library. I thought it was strange, because they talk about the heroics of Martin Septim and High Chancellor Ocato and the Blades, but they never say..." She stopped and looked at her friend. "They never really say who saved Kvatch."

Aden frowned. "Well, that was the Hero of Kvatch, obviously. The clue is in the name."

"Yes," she replied, standing. "But they never say anything _about_ the Hero... It's like they didn't even exist."

The Redguard was indignant. "Well I know the Hero existed because I spoke to h-" He paused and sprung to his feet. "I made a statue of her!" He grabbed Finny's hand and pulled her away from Antus Pinder down one of the small side-alleys.

They had been down here before, over the years, but right now the only thing Aden could remember was the once that he had dragged the Hero of Kvatch down here with her Argonian friend. It was just after the rebuilding effort had begun, after the rains had finished but before the war was over. There was rubble everywhere and houses were being built crudely with wooden crossbars and coarse mud walls covered in planks and boards. He could see it vividly, smell every smell again. He could feel the mud in his toes and spattered up his legs, hear the thumps of hammers and the scouring of ruins on the other side of the city. All at once he was nine years old again, scampering along on legs like sticks with a permanent grin on his small face.

The tree was still there after all these years. It was a burnt, sorry old thing that had never grown again and done little more than rot over the past ten years, but his statue was right where he had left it, tied to the trunk with string and a thin piece of wire. It was crude: a few sticks lashed together with a couple of metal pipes and some silvery brackets that had long since turned brown bolted up to hold it in place.

Kolfinna peered at the thing suspiciously. "What does it say there?" she asked, pointing at a tiny wooden plaque that he been beaten into the tree trunk so hard that the bark had split behind it.

Aden's brown eyes widened to see it again. _The Heroe of Kvatch. Eydarreee._ He could almost see her when he looked into his memories, almost touch her... But she wasn't quite there, his Hero... She was gone. A hooded figure in a dark street, garbed in black from head to toe. This statue was all he had of her now, and it was the crude representation of a nine year old boy created from broken bits of rubbish. "It says..." he started, but his throat was dry. "The Hero of Kvatch. Idari."

"That was her name?" Even semi-blind, the Nord's eyes were sparkling in the sunlight. She seemed to brighten at the prospect, as though she had never been down this way before and never seen the statue, never heard the tale. They had come here as children, but briefly and without due attention paid to the burnt out old tree. "Idari? What happened to her?"

"That's the question I can't answer."

Finny frowned deeply. "It doesn't say in the history books... She just seems to... disappear after saving Kvatch."

"But I know she didn't. I _met_ her. I _spoke_ to her!" Aden insisted. Even if she was just a shadow of his past, she had still been there in the flesh... She had told him her name.

"Then let's find out where she went."

It was a stupid plan, ridiculous even, but to the Redguard it made perfect sense. "We'd have to leave Kvatch," he pointed out.

"We can't stay here forever."

"But we don't know where it would take us... Maybe even beyond Cyrodiil."

The girl smirked. "I've always wanted to see the rest of the continent."

"Finny, you're not being logical."

"No, Aden," she replied, shaking her head. "Think about it. You've never been beyond this plateau, and I've been here ever since my father left me here in some falling down old shack with a bag of flatbread and a jar of salted beef. At least your parents only left you when they died, Aden. Now is our chance to do something, and to find something out that will help this town! We _have_ to go, Aden..." She crossed her arms firmly. "And if you refuse to go then I'll go alone."

The Redguard observed his friend coolly. "You know it's not safe outside of Kvatch. The anarchy is spread right across the province, everywhere but this county. Kvatch has only stayed out of it because we're not ruled by one count, and that's only because Savlian Matius refused it all those years ago. You'd be dead before you reached Skingrad... And besides, where do you exactly propose to look? How do you find a Hero who disappeared? We only have her first name, and we don't even have a reliable picture of what she looked like..."

"Other people in town will remember her."

"And what if she's dead? What will we do then?"

Kolfinna smiled sweetly. "We will pay her tribute. She saved your town, Aden... This whole place owes her." She pushed her hood back off of her pink hair and stared at him until she had to look away from the light. "You'd be dead without her. This whole province would be dead without her... Judging by what became of Martin Septim."

"Yes, but..." His heart sank when he considered the more delicate logistics of his having to leave his city for the very first time and he heaved a heavy sigh.

She flung her arms around him and hugged him tightly. "Your aunt doesn't need you to protect her. She has seen almost fifty winters and yet she can still fracture your finger in training. She survived the Sack of Kvatch with blood on her blade; how many people can boast that? Only her and Savlian Matius and Merandil. All the others are dead or left. She is not weak, Aden. Do not worry about her."

"Yes, but I'd have to leave..." He sighed again, more heavily than before, wrapping his arms around the Nord girl and holding her close. "My parents."

"I feel awful saying this, Aden, but they're dead. They wouldn't want you to stay here forever. We won't be doing this for glory; we'll be doing this in memory of those who died here ten years ago... Isn't that a cause worth fighting for?"

"I should hope it doesn't come to fighting," he whispered, disentangling himself from his friend and looking around as though somebody was going to walk into their conversation and disturb them. It wouldn't happen though. Nobody came to this part of town anymore, save for the people who lived here, and all of the doors to their houses were facing away from the burnt old tree. It reminded people too strongly of the Sack, yet nobody had had the time to uproot it when they were rebuilding; it had still been living back then, and they couldn't stand the thought of another needless death. "Where would we go?"

She looked him in the eye this time, trying her hardest not to squint. "The Imperial City of course."

"The centre of the anarchy, huh?" They were between kings and without a leader. High Chancellor Ocato of the Elder Council had been killed during the final battle of the Oblivion Crisis – though the details of his death had never reached as far as the ears of small children in a sacked city – and the Council, in typical Council-style, had answered with only silence, never choosing themselves a new leader and never passing any decisions on who should succeed the Septims to the throne. A great chaos had reigned ever since.

Finny just grinned. "It'll be an adventure, won't it? Who knows where it'll take us?"

"Hopefully not to shallow graves..."

"Don't be so pessimistic!" She punched him in the arm. "We won't die. We will arrive back in Kvatch having found out what happened to their great Hero, and the people will thank us."

The Redguard glared at her until he burst out laughing. He couldn't stay angry with her for more than a few minutes, especially with that pink mop of hair she seemed to be sporting today; it was a funny sight. "OK, we'll go." Her beaming smile was worth it. "But I don't think we should go alone. Who else do you think we can rope in?"

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><p><em>Author Note 2: Yes, yes, the first line is a little reminiscent of a chapter in A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. That does not make it plagiarism. The idea behind the line fit, and this particular line is different; I checked. Yes, I know giving a character pink hair is a complete no-no, but she did it accidentally, and it was just the image of an albino Nord girl with candy pink hair that amused me too much to pass up. Aden is the same kid from one of the chapters of BiA... Did you expect a sequel about him?<em>

_This one shouldn't be quite as long as the last one, and it seemed a good way to start the new year. Yes, it is 2012 in England right now, so Happy New Year everybody :)_


	2. Eleanor

_Chapter 2_

'Feu', they called her. _Fire_, in the old Breton language that some scarce few still spoke on High Rock. Fire for her hair, a vivid ginger colour that she had inherited from the maternal grandmother who had died before she was born. Fire for the way that she had braved the flames with her elder sister Amarie in order to keep her younger brother and sister safe during the great battle for Kvatch. Fire for her temperament.

Eleanor Renault was known for her temper. The place she had inherited _that_ from remained a mystery.

The sky was bleak. It had been like this for some time, she supposed as she stepped from her front door out into the fresh air. Crossing the threshold was like entering a different planet: inside was stuffy, cramped and oppressive, and yet somehow the outdoors managed to be the compete opposite: light, airy, spacious… The Renault family owned one of the largest houses in Kvatch due to their large number – five survivors from one family was unheard of save for them – and still their rooms were too dark, too warm, too crowded. Eleanor hated it.

Still, the sky was bleak, somewhere between rain and sun, covered with clouds from horizon to horizon. A gust of wind scoured her face and blew her hair into her eyes; she cursed vehemently, seizing the offending locks and pulling them tightly back into a ponytail held by a strip of blue cloth she had in a pocket. Sometimes she despised nature, though the Breton girl far preferred that to being cramped inside with her three siblings and her mother. These days her mother did little besides staring forlornly into the small cookfire that she jabbed with a stick from time to time, and sobbing about the loss of her husband so long ago. Sometimes she could go for days at a time without moving a muscle and then suddenly when all her children feared she had passed on from this world they would hear a sniff or see a fat wet tear trailing down her pale cheeks onto the embers beneath her feet. Cybelle Renault had already seen her fiftieth winter, but her small brood knew she would not see many more.

The house they lived in was near the outer wall of Kvatch, cramped in a corner where it had always been. It had not sustained too much damage when the daedra had invaded, save for a small section of rubble causing the roof to cave in, so the townsfolk had opted instead to rebuild it – though it had never been the same since. Eleanor could remember what it had been like before, a small thing with three rooms, brown brick walls and a wooden slat roof, little windows filled with glass and a little door painted green. Now the walls were blackened bricks covered in soot and the roof had been replaced, though some of the boards were broken and burnt, and almost none of them fit together – the gaps had been filled in with some kind of gloopy plaster that stank whenever it rained and still looked as though it hadn't set almost a decade later. There was only one window too, and all of the glass in the town had been shattered save for that which was still in place now, having to be replaced by thick blankets that did little to stop the wind and rain and somehow kept all the heat inside; the door had been pulled from a wreckage and bore its scars proudly, though it looked as though some daedra had had a go at it with an axe, and if one were to place their hand upon it too haphazardly they would come away full of splinters.

She would have left, if not for her mother. She was three-and-twenty, an Associate of the Fighters Guild and had enough money saved to bear herself far away from Kvatch. The city was her world and all she had ever known, but she wished to leave it more than anything. It still carried with it too many fearful memories.

When the daedra had come she had been separated from her parents by a great wall of fire with her elder sister Amarie and her younger brother Yves. They had fought, her and Amarie, to protect the boy who was little more than six, and they had killed for the very first time when they were not even yet grown. Am had been fifteen, and she had fared worst of the three of them when a slash from a clannfear sent a cascade of blood spewing from her right arm. Though Oleta had saved the limb, she had never been able to use it again. Their father had found them and saved them and sent them beyond the city, but he himself had never returned.

Yves and Armynél had been too young to remember much of that day. They were probably lucky.

Slowly, Eleanor walked down the street. She had walked down _this_ street more times than she could count and could have done it blindfolded by now; even the burning and rebuilding had not changed the layout of this road much, and most of the houses here were originals that had only been lightly patched up. This area of Kvatch had barely been hit, save for the odd ember causing an ancient timber roof to ignite, and even then most of the damage had been superficial. Other areas had been razed to the ground.

After the battle, they had told her that her father had saved a whole score of lives from the daedra before he finally fell, and as a result his memorial was somewhat larger than most of the others. She visited it daily, even if it meant venturing out in the dead of night to do so.

"Hello, father," she said to the plaque, kneeling beside it. Even though she had never set foot in High Rock, her voice was still vaguely accented. It was a boring old thing, this slab of tarnished bronze that had been worn down until it was almost flat and the wording was almost completely faded, but it symbolised so much to her. Beneath it they had buried Etienne Renault's silver shortsword, the only recognisable part of him that they had managed to find amid the carnage. "Mother is worse today." It was not an exaggeration; their mother never seemed to get any better, though whether she was worse or not was not within Eleanor's power to gauge. "I think she may be seeing you again before too long." But Feu had been saying that every day for the last six years and nothing had come of it yet. "Pray for us, father."

There was nothing more to say. It was not as if a lump of rock could answer her questions, reply to her words, or feel anguish at her news…

She stood and looked upwards. Her father's plate was just beneath the walls of the chapel and was nearly always in shadow; she had complained about it once upon a time, that she wanted her father to see the morning sun and admire the colours in the sky when night came. Then Savlian Matius had reminded her that her father was dead and where they placed his memorial stone really meant little in the grand scheme of the world. He was not a harsh man, the grizzled old guardsman who sat the town council, but in this case a lie to ease her pain would have made no difference but to make it worse.

"Well met, sister." The voice behind her made her jump until she recognised the voice as that of her sister Amarie. She turned to look at her, taking care not to tread on their father's grave. The girl before her was five-and-twenty and taller than Eleanor by at least three inches; her brown hair – a colour shared by every Renault, it seemed, except Feu herself and this elusive grandmother – reached just below her shoulders and was swept from her face by a band tied around her forehead that was decorated with brown felt shapes, and her dark oily-blue eyes smiled with the rest of her. She was dressed in a simple green tunic trimmed with silvery thread that reached her knees and was gathered in at the waist by a length of hempen cord, and on her feet were basic brown felt shoes. Her right arm hung limply by her side where it had been these past ten years, but she had never once managed to let her disability get the better of her; the town's resident Bosmeri seamstress Emelin had taught her how to use magic to stitch and from that skill she had made her career. "How is mother today?" Amarie lived with Emelin these days.

Eleanor sighed. "I would say she was worse, but it's hard to tell. She's not eating again."

Amarie made a face. "I swear that woman must be so selfish…" Cybelle Renault had disapproved of her daughter's leaving home and as such the girl seldom visited except to see her siblings. "How are Yves and Nel taking it?"

"They've grown to expect it…" At sixteen and fourteen, the two youngest Renault children could not remember a great deal _other_ than their mother being depressed and not eating. Yves had decided that he was grown now and would take responsibility for the house and everyone in it, despite his sisters imploring him to do something of more use with his life. "Listen, Am, about the other day…"

Her sister just smiled knowingly. "Feu, you know I could never blame you for your temper. It's what makes you you!" She embraced the girl with her one good arm. "And for whatever it may be worth, do not feel that you have to stay in Kvatch just because of mother or me or Yves or Armynél… I will take care of them if you really want to go. The whole world is waiting for you!"

"Thank you."

"You do not need to thank me," Amarie replied with a chuckle. "That is merely what sisters are for!" Eleanor had to laugh at that. "Now I must be off… Emelin is expecting me at the house soon. You're welcome to visit whenever you wish."

"I know, sister." She had been extended the same invitation every single time they parted since her sibling had moved away from their home. To this day she had never accepted it.

The sound of feet to her left barely attracted her attention as she gazed across the town square in the direction of the gates. Amarie's promise had been one she so desperately wanted to take her up on, the one that would bear her away from this place where only dreams of fire and blood filled her nights and only sobs and loss filled her days.

The 'square', or so they called it, was hardly square-shaped. It was twenty feet across but stretched all the way from the steps into the chapel to the heavy wooden gates, plaques spreading only about two-thirds of the way and after that bare stone or brick, or whatever material had been to hand. On one side stood an inn that had never existed before the daedra came, _The Bleeding Dremora_, the sign outside proclaimed proudly, a claim that was strengthened by a simple glossy painting of one of the daedric menaces lying in a blood of glistening scarlet-and-crimson blood. The innkeeper was a Dunmeri man who had lost his wife and almost his small daughter Nalasa in the fires, only for the tiny girl to be found curled up in a cupboard almost two days after they had returned to their city; she had never spoken of her ordeal, though her father liked to boast her bravery to every person who ever stepped through his front door. Across the square, the only building of note was a small shop with soot-blackened windows that had survived the kiss of the flames and half looked as though a gust of wind would knock it down, and yet ten years later it still stood in as rickety a fashion as it had a decade ago; the proprietor had died when his shop had not, and his son had been stolen away by a terrible fever a few years later, leaving only a scarred, niggardly brother from Anvil who drove away any customer who had survived with his sharp tongue and steep prices. Eleanor had all but forgotten his name.

"So you're thinking of leaving, Feu?" somebody asked her. She had to cringe at the way they pronounced her nickname; it had begun simply as what her family called her, but had spread like a vicious disease that had infected the whole town. Only those of Breton heritage could say it correctly, or that was what she had come to expect.

"What's it to you?" she demanded, rounding on the owner of the voice. It was that white Nord girl Kolfinna and Tierra's nephew Aden that stood before her, though she didn't know what else she ought to have expected – they were always together, when he was not training and she was not too busy blowing things up in the Mages Guild. Eleanor had heard the reports of the last time they had done destruction training. Apparently it had not been an easy mess to clean up.

The Nord smiled. "Nothing, except that we're leaving too…"

"We're going in search of the Hero of Kvatch," Aden explained.

It was a childish endeavour, to think that they could simply go running off into the wilderness in search of someone who was most likely dead… But Feu could see the appeal in it. The town owed itself to the valour of that woman, even if all and sundry claimed that she was utterly detestable; at the end of the day, she had still closed the Oblivion gate. Whether she had stuck around afterwards or not was of little consequence. "Where would you be going?"

"The most logical place would be the Imperial City," admitted the Redguard. "There would always be Cloud Ruler Temple – because that's where Martin was, so logically where she was – but nobody's seen much of the Blades since the Emperor died. What good is a bodyguard without a body to guard?"

Eleanor raised an eyebrow and laughed. "So you're going to the Imperial City? The centre of the anarchy and possibly the most dangerous place to be at this time?" Aden nodded. "Then you're idiots. You'll be dead before you ever get there. Reports are that banditry is worse than ever before." She had seen that first hand when on one or two contracts with the Fighters Guild, but work was slow and pay was slower right now.

Kolfinna was smirking. That was never a good sign. The girl was known for her eccentricities and obscure sense of logic. "You see, Feu-" The Breton in question winced at that word. "- That is why we asked you along with us! You're in the Fighters Guild, and you're looking to leave here, right?"

"Not as far as the Imperial City. I was thinking more in terms of Anvil or Skingrad."

"And where's the fun in that?" She hated to admit it, but Eleanor almost agreed with this girl. "Work here it slow, and work there wouldn't be any better… And they're _more_ struck by the anarchy, aren't they? They've all got counts and stuff. If you come with us, at least you'll have a goal, right? Aden can fight, and I've got my magic." She had seen Aden's fighting, and it was nothing extraordinary; he was training to be a guard with his aunt who was almost as old as her mother and yet looked half her age. Tierra had fought in the battle all those years ago, and there was no denying that she was an excellent sword; her nephew, on the other hand, was a perfectly mediocre fighter who had been too young when the daedra came and never used real steel or fought a real enemy. And as for Kolfinna's magic… Eleanor preferred not to comment on that. "It'll be an adventure."

The Breton considered their proposal. She had been planning to leave, yes, but not so soon, not while her mother still drew breath, not while her siblings were still young. "When will you be going?" she asked feebly, glancing at her father's memorial. If she left the town, she'd leave him behind as well.

It was Aden who answered: "Tomorrow, maybe the day after. I _saw_ her, the Hero of Kvatch. I _spoke _to her. You were there, in the chapel, right? You saw her?" There was something almost manic in the way he claimed this fact so urgently.

"Yes," Eleanor admitted. "Though only from afar." She had been a short woman garbed in black, and was the last thing that Feu wanted to see when her sister was so close to dying and her father was lost. These days she saw that they owed the woman a debt of gratitude, but looking back she understood her own reasons all the better. "What will you do if you find her? What will you do if you don't?" That made them pause. They obviously hadn't thought that far ahead.

"Pay her tribute, whether she is dead or alive," was all she extracted from Kolfinna. "And then make our way in life, I guess. There is not a great deal else we could do…" _Precisely_.

Though she had to agree that the prospect was tempting. The Hero had saved them all and deserved their so-called 'tribute' if nothing else, and after that she would be free to do what she wanted or work for her guild. It would get her away from here, at least. Thoughts of her mother gave her pause, however. "Will you allow me time to think?" she asked them when choicer words failed her. "Meet me here in the morning after first light."

When they left her she sank down next to her father again and prayed silently to the Nine that she might make the right decision. Oft she had been asked why she persisted to worship the gods that had failed her so spectacularly when it came to saving Kvatch, but she told them quite vehemently that faith was of no use unless it was tested. Her family had escaped almost unscathed from the Oblivion Crisis, save for her father and his sister in the Blades who had fallen to the Mythic Dawn protecting the Emperor before his assassination, and Eleanor was beyond sure when she suspected that it was the Nine's way of rewarding her for remaining devout to them. Her aunt and father had not been dealt so bad a hand either, for they had been taken to Aetherius to live alongside the gods who resided there.

"What would you do, father?" she asked in a voice barely louder than the quietest of whispers, placing a palm against the bronze of his memorial and searching deep within herself for the answer. In her mind's eye, a sudden flash brought to light her father's silver shortsword a millisecond before it was gone again into the darkness followed by her mother's face, and then Amarie and Yves and Armynél, before it settled on the broken bodies of Aden and Kolfinna lying by the side of the Gold Road with blood pooling around them in violent crimson, staining the white girl pink. _What would you do, father?_ She asked again, but this time her lips made no sound. The pictures followed again, more slowly, round and round and round all the while she was trying to think, to decide. Clearly, her father was as conflicted about this as she was.

Rising, Eleanor looked back up at the chapel again. The building had been here as long as the town had, she was sure, and with its sharp sandstone walls it looked so regal that she felt almost inadequate in its presence. During the great battle, the steeple had been sheared off by that hideous pincer-covered machine that had smashed through their gates like a knife might slide through a lump of butter – though with decidedly more noise and destructive power – and crashed down on the buildings and people below. After ten years, the tower had been rebuilt using the same old stone, but it was cracked and broken, black and bloody. It did not fit well.

She walked through the heavy oak doors as calmly as she could manage while another score of images more vivid than the last pierced her mind. Through some miracle a few of the stained glass windows had survived, though the main one above the altar had been blown out when the steeple went down; if glass was too expensive, stained glass was a thousand times worse, so the window frames had been left empty with boards in them, something Feu considered to be an absolute travesty and verging on sacrilegious. The town could not justify the expenditure though. _When I have enough money, I will buy them one_, she vowed, walking between the nine altars that lined the main knave of the chapel that looked emptier than usual. There were always some people here praying for lost loved ones, but Eleanor had never seen quite this small a number of them. A tall, thin Imperial guardsman was beseeching Talos to make his sword swift and strong, and on the other side a beautiful Altmeri woman was praying that Mara would send her love home from his merchant travels unharmed. Otherwise the place was empty, save for the priestess Weedum-Ja who had been here since before the city was destroyed and claimed that nothing would ever drive her away; she knelt in silent prayer before the main altar.

The Breton lit a candle to Julianos, for wisdom, before she sat in an aisle to think, closing her eyes. Staying here to care for her mother and siblings and to mourn for her dead was a prospect that she had no problem with. She had been doing the same for the past ten years without complaining and she could continue doing so for another ten… And yet the prospect of adventure and of _living her life_ called to her. She wanted nothing more than to leave and never set another foot in this scarred, broken town, but she wanted nothing more than to stay here forever at the same time and to the same extent.

"What troubles you, child?" The priestess slipped onto a bench beside her and pressed a cold scaled hand to her heart. The Argonian woman was wiser than she let on to those who did not share her faith, and older than she would seem to look at her.

"Just a proposition I have had," Eleanor murmured. "I can leave Kvatch for good or stay here forever… I don't quite know what to do." Being in the holy presence tended to calm her temper to a degree where she did not snap at people, though many years ago she had realised that she would never find it within herself to even raise her voice to Weedum-Ja, such had the priestess helped her in the past.

"And were those the exact terms of the proposition? That you might leave forever or stay forever?"

Considering, Feu shook her head.

The Argonian smiled wryly. "Then why is it that you speak of forever? You may leave and then return or stay and then leave. You must follow your heart; Julianos will guide you." She gestured to the window of the god of wisdom and logic – it was one of only three that had survived, and depicted an aging man with hair turning grey and a long flowing beard, a robe in red and blue that was flecked with dirt from before and ash from after.

"I looked to my father for guidance," she admitted. She often did when she was confused. "But he seemed as baffled as I am."

For a long time, Weedum-Ja said nothing. The doors opened and shut as the guardsman left to go to his duty, and across the room the Altmer rose to leave now that her prayers were spoken. Soon the place was as empty as a tomb and just as quiet, except for a fiery-haired Breton and an old Argonian priestess. It was a cavernous space, terrifying, and the silence seemed to echo loudly, drowning out all other sounds.

"Your father left this place when he was about your age," the woman said eventually. Her words cut through every thought that had been in Eleanor's head at that moment and planted themselves deeply in her mind. The Argonian beamed again. "He came back a few months later with a bride and a renewed faith. He died for this town, and told me once that truly he had always known that it was his one true home, but he would have given up an eternity here for those few months away if given the choice. If it is your mother's deteriorating health you fear for, it is clear to me that her spirit has been walking in Aetherius for these past ten years, even if her body has remained anchored firmly to Nirn, and your siblings are strong, they will not be alone when surrounded by a community as is found these days, I fear, only in Kvatch. When you return, the city will welcome you back with the same open arms they welcomed your father back with; though I cannot say you will find the world as good a place as he did."

Feu paused and then nodded. "Thank you," she said, as though the words of the priestess would somehow along her to make up her mind, as though being told that her mother was all but dead was an easy thing to digest. She had known it for a long time, in her heart of hearts, but denial is often the main cause of blindness and she had _so_ wanted her mother to live, to get better. She had known, though, she had always known. "I should be getting back…" She stood, and Weedum-Ja did the same. "Really. Thank you."

The Argonian's scaly lips curled upwards. "I am just a mouthpiece of the Nine," she said. "I pray that they will guide you on your journey."

_I haven't even decided to go yet_. When she arrived back outside, Eleanor was shocked to find that darkness was already clawing at the horizon. _How long was I even in there?_ Long shadows stretched out to the east like dark fingers reaching for some unseen goal, engulfing half of the plaques and making the other half glow in the dimming light. They twinkled, the few that still had their shine after all these years, and the sparkles looked like tiny starlets stuck too close to the ground, struggling to rise into the sky where they belonged. She hurried home.

The room was much the same as she had left it when she had stepped outside to visit her father, save for the black pot that her little sister had hung over the fire. Armynél tended it diligently, and barely even looked up to acknowledge her coming as she sat across from their mother who was swathed in a blanket like a baby. The fire-pit was in the centre of the room, and a wave of warmth struck Eleanor as she stepped through the door, even though one of her siblings had taken down some of the cloths from the windows in order to cool the place. It was not a big house, though what had once been three rooms were now two – a partition wall had collapsed along with the roof, allowing them the liberty of having a battered old table at one end where they might take their meals. The girls slept in the back room, while Yves insisted on keeping their mother company as she gazed longingly into the flames, searching for truth.

Cybelle Renault had been beautiful, once. Her hair had been brown, reaching the small of her back in gentle ripples. Her eyes had been blue as the sky when the sun was high and the clouds had been banished from sight, smiling and laughing along with her youthful face. Until the day the daedra came. People who knew her from before would not recognise her now; she had aged almost forty years in the space of just ten, and her body was stooped and bent like some old crone. Her hair was ragged and grey, and fell out in clumps whenever one tried to lay a hand upon it to the extent that her daughters had taken to wrapping it in a scarf. Her face was lined and wrinkled and she was thinner than she had been, her lips moving wordlessly for most of the day and all of the night; even when she slept she could not find her peace. Even her eyes had been ravaged; in one the pupil had turned milky and dim, while the other was so shot with red from years of crying that it looked as though she had been stabbed. She huddled now beneath piles of furs as if she was cold, though she was less than a metre from a roaring fire, and rocked herself back and forth, interacting with nothing save her own insanity.

"What are you cooking there?" Feu asked her sister. In the firelight, her hair looked as though it too were ablaze.

Armynél shrugged. She was not the most talkative of girls, though her heart was in the right place; she had given up a decade of her life to care for the mother whom she had barely known. At fourteen she was a pretty child, though she still had largely the physique of a small boy, and both of her elder sisters agreed that she should be running about in the streets making friends before she fully became a woman. She left this building about as regularly as their mother did.

Eleanor squatted next to her. Nel was kneeling on the floor, stirring something that looked like stew, though she couldn't be sure of exactly what it was. "How can you be cooking something you don't know about?" she asked gently.

It was Yves who answered, their brother, a boy who thought himself a man because he had seen his sixteenth winter. He was a scrawny thing with elbows like knifes if you let him poke you with them. "Sigrid gave it to us." Sigrid and Emelin had been the only survivors from the Kvatch Mages Guild, only these days Emelin had given it up and Sigrid had not spoken a word in ten years, which did not bode well for her magical ability. Every now and again she would drop off a stew or meal of some description for the Renault children, as though they were still too small to cook for themselves; she had never told them why.

"Hmm…" Eleanor mused. "Fair enough."

"Hey Feu," Yves piped up again. He was sitting at the table with a lump of wood in one had and a blunt knife in the other, no doubt trying to create some amazing piece of sculpture. His sister looked up. "I heard that Finny and Aden asked you to go with them to the Imperial City."

Armynél said nothing.

_How did they find out so quickly?_ "Who told you that?"

"They did. I went to see Am earlier… You were in the chapel or something. I dunno."

"Yes, they asked."

He leant forward, dark blue eyes shimmering. "And what did you tell them?"

"That I would think about it and answer tomorrow."

The boy rose and crossed the room; Eleanor noticed immediately that his feet were bare and bloody, as though he had been running through the streets without shoes again. He had a curious manner, her brother. "And what are you going to answer them?" Sinking down next to her, Yves dropped his chunk of wood into the fire and watched in awe as the flames licked at it hungrily.

"What would you do?"

He smirked. "Go. Make myself rich and famous. Come back with a wife and seven children, and have everyone hail me as amazing." Beside her Nel scoffed, stirring the mystery stew again.

"That stuff only happens in story books, you know…"

"That's the thing, Feu," Armynél replied, speaking for the first time in a hushed whisper. "Your life _is_ a story book, and _you_ are the author. Don't stay here for our sakes." It wasn't a plea. It was an order.

The older girl frowned. "I'm still thinking about it," she told them stiffly so that they said nothing more on the matter.

When it came, the food was nothing particularly special – a simple lamb stew accompanied by chunks of blackened flatbread torn from a loaf that Amarie had given to Yves earlier that day. Eleanor barely tasted it, so perplexed was she by the question as to whether she ought to leave with Aden and Kolfinna or stay; everyone had told her to go and live her life and yet something was holding her back, a niggling sense of guilt at abandoning everybody and everything that she had ever known. While they ate, their brother regaled them with a story about how he had managed to save a man's life with nothing more than a burlap sack and a rotten apple; it was a tale that he had told many a time before, though each time it seemed to grow more and more unbelievable and less and less close to the truth. The man's life had never even been in danger, though his purse had been about to be cut by some sneaky thief from Bravil, and all Yves had done was throw the apple at the thief – he missed and hit the victim – before tripping him over with some sacking. Sometimes he told it that the man had been at knife point, and sometimes there were five or six (and once even ten) thugs, all intent on bloody murder and armed to the teeth. His sisters had given up listening to him long ago.

"- and then this man had this wolf, right? And it jumped at me, gnashing it's teeth together and like… foaming at the mouth… And I fought it off, punching and kicking it and all that before strangling it with a sack. Then I used that same sack to pull the robber off of the man, who he was like… trying to kill with a knife or a club or something-"

Armynel sighed at that and, pushing a lump of potato around her wooden bowl with the end of her cracked spoon, dared to ask a question. "How can you not tell if it was a knife or a club? They're pretty different, you know."

Yves was indignant. "Yeah, but it all happened so _fast_," he countered, as he almost always did. "Anyway, I jumped on him with nothing more than this sack in my hands, and he was fighting me and all, and he was _huge_, but I didn't give in, even when he hit me with his weapon. See?" He showed them the scar that they both knew he had got when he was trying to skin a rabbit for their evening meal and his knife had slipped, slicing the palm of his right hand open from just beneath his thumb to a little below his ring finger. They chose not to argue this time. "And then the guards showed up and killed him right there and then, and they said I was a hero and _everything_!" The man had been jailed and then sent back to Bravil in fetters, though Yves liked the story better when it ended with blood and gore. "Then I skinned that wolf. See? It's that one that mother's got round her today." They turned to look at her, though it was just something that they had pulled from the wreckage of their house after the fires were put out – not that her brother was old enough to remember that happening. "They wanted to give me a reward and all, but I just said that the ability to do some good in this world was enough and went home."

"How humble of you," Eleanor breathed sarcastically, mopping up the last dregs of her stew with the bread. "Has mother eaten today?"

"She had a crumb of cheese earlier," Nel replied impassively. "Though that's more than she had yesterday," she admitted, frowning. "I even managed to get her to drink a sip of water, though you would have thought I was trying to poison her, the amount of fuss she made."

"That's good. It's better than nothing, at least." Eleanor rose. "I'm going to sleep," she announced, leaving the table and walking towards the back room.

"Feu," Yves called after her, jumping up from his own place in case she failed to acknowledge him. She turned back and blinked at him. "We won't mind if you're gone tomorrow," he said. "Will we, Nel?" Their sister shook her head, gathering up the dishes so that she could wash them before she went to sleep; sometimes it did not show that she was only fourteen. "And Am won't either. At least _one_ of us should do something half decent with their life…"

* * *

><p><em>Author Note: Thanks to those of you who reviewed the last chapter. This one's quite long, considering that it's only from one POV, I guess... What do you think of my characters so far?<em>


	3. Arathor

_Chapter 3_

Morning came as it always did. It was a chilly sunrise, to say the least, but Arathor loved it no less than he always did to see the dark sky suddenly ablaze with the first tendrils of light as they spread outwards, shattering into a rainbow of colour and turning the cloud a brilliant red. He sat on the wooden steps of the stables outside Kvatch watching it, back pressed against a dark pillar, apple in hand, contemplating his future slowly.

He sniffed. "Rain's coming," he said to nobody, hauling himself to his feet before vaulting a fence into the paddock. There had never been many horses up here in all the years he had hung around, and today was no exception; they slept huddled under a tarpaulin he had slung up to keep them dry, the four white animals he had brought with him from Anvil after he had vowed to come up here. He dropped the apple into a feeding trough and walked off, satisfied.

It was a quiet life here in Kvatch to say the least. Very few traders ever went up the plateau and very few townsfolk ever went down; they kept themselves apart from the rest of Cyrodiil by not being involved in any of that politics business that frankly the mer did not wish to understand, and he couldn't say he blamed them. What little news that did make it up the steep winding road did not appear to be good, though he had to admit that business would be better somewhere else. It was hard to be an ostler in a town with only four horses.

Padding back into his house, Arathor threw himself back into a chair and kicked his feet up on the table, scowling at the offending appendages as he did so. It was not so much the feet themselves that annoyed him, but rather the skin that covered them, the thing that made so many people dislike him on sight. The product of an infidelity, Arathor was neither a Bosmer nor a Dunmer, but somewhere in between – his skin was neither Dunmeri green nor Bosmeri tan, and his hair was blond while his eyes had turned out crimson. He had lost track of the number of times he had been mistaken for a vampire as a result. Tall for a Wood Elf and short for a Dark Elf, he could not fit into either society, and had been spurned by both until he had run away to Cyrodiil when he had had enough. He kept his father's clan name – though technically it did not belong to him - but he did not find honour in it.

The only thing Arathor Samarys truly classed himself as was a mer; he was barely an ostler and he was barely a citizen of Kvatch. At least nobody could challenge him if he called himself a mer.

His father was dead though, along with all of the trueborn Samarys children, killed when the Ministry of Truth had crashed into Vivec and crushed them. Of that misfortune, Arathor merely said '_Truth hurts'_, though he was sure never to clarify whether he meant the truth of having a bastard half-breed for a son or having a hollowed out moon land on his head. His mother was somewhere in Valenwood, he suspected – though he couldn't say for certain. There was every possibility that she was dead – and she would likely stay there forever. The Bosmer, while outwardly a warmer race than their dark-skinned counterparts, had not accepted him any more than the Dunmer had, especially when he refused to honour their Green Pact and blithely developed a liking for apples. He had left the province soon afterwards.

So here he was, Arathor Samarys, twenty-six year old half-Bosmeri bastard, sitting in a wooden house beyond the walls of a city that he considered somewhat akin to a phoenix. It had risen from the ashes, stronger than before from what he had heard. He had not seen it before and he had seldom seen it afterwards; he only had the words of those few travellers who ventured up here to go on.

He rose again, dusting off his tan trousers with the palm of his mud-covered hand before crossing his tiny house to pick up the only book he had ever read: _Notes on Racial Phylogeny_. It was a subject close to his heart, if he had to put a reason on why exactly he felt the need to keep it close, and he had learnt to read by scouring its pages and asking letter sounds from clients. In short, it described what was created when races interbred, and the characteristics those offspring presented to the world. Arathor particularly liked the line which stated clearly that in most cases the offspring took the race of the mother, with a select few traits from the father's race. "Thank you father," he muttered as he flicked through the pages for the umpteenth time. They were smeared with grime from years of use and tattered all along one edge. "Your _trait_ gets me mistaken for a vampire."

To say that he was not sore about that fact would have been a lie.

The knock to his door startled him and he dropped his book onto the straw pallet he called a bed. He rarely slept in the thing, and a plume of dust filled his lungs as the manuscript thumped it. He coughed violently. _There are never customers this early_, he complained bitterly to himself as he tried to expel the rest of the filth from his airways until his eyes started streaming. Apparently these customers were impatient, because they knocked again all the more firmly.

"We'd like to buy three horses," a female voice informed him before he'd even opened the door more than a crack. She sounded like a Nord, and when he looked he saw that his suspicions had been correct, though she was the strangest looking Nord he had ever laid eyes on. Her skin was whiter than milk and she was squinting at him from beneath a green mage's hood.

"Three?"

A Breton was with her too. A woman who looked almost of age with Arathor with red hair like fire and a sword strapped around her waist, a shield slung across her back and potions lodged in her sword belt. "Yes, three. Weren't you listening?"

"It's not like you can blame the man…" a Redguard responded. He was tall for his race, but not such much that it was especially noticeable, and his hair was pulled into fine braids that reached his shoulders before they were secured off his face. The sword he wore looked new and made of iron, but it seemed as though he was unused to the weight judging by the way he was leaning to one side and kept subconsciously touching the hilt. When he took a good look at Arathor, his eyes widened.

"I'm not a vampire," the half-Bosmer explained wearily, bearing his regular sized teeth in order to prove the point. These days he found it easier to pre-empt the question before they even asked it rather than wait for the panic to set in. It tended to scare the horses.

"But- But your eyes are…"

"My father was a Dunmer." Once upon a time he might have tried to deny that fact and claim that he was simply a Bosmer with naturally red eyes, but somewhere along the way he had grown up and learned to accept his heritage for what it was.

The Nord girl grinned beneath her hood; it was a nice smile, a far cry from the ones he usually got when he got around to clearing up their troubles. "You don't _look_ like a Dunmer," she laughed, though she sounded more like she was hyperventilating. The other two did not seem to see the joke – the Redguard had hung back a little from the two women and the Breton appeared to disapprove of him already.

"That's because I'm not."

"A _half_ Dunmer then?" she chuckled, pushing back her hood. "You're not the only one who's got a strange appearance. I turned my hair pink!" True to her words, her hair was indeed bright pink, a ridiculous colour for a girl with such a pale complexion. Arathor found himself tittering with her, and even the Redguard boy was smirking. The Breton, however, still was not impressed. "I did it by accident, mind you… A spell kind of… Backfired? Or… Or maybe just failed to Dispel. I'm hoping it'll fade or something." She pulled her hood back up. It was probably a wise action.

"What about these horses?" the Breton girl folded her arms. She was about the same height as Arathor and she met his gaze without flinching.

The ostler sighed. "See, I only have four horses…"

"And we only want three. Your problem being?"

His eyes narrowed at her by a fraction, but he decided that it was probably best not to let himself be rude to one of the few customers he actually got up here. "I only have four horses, and you only want three. The problem, you see, is that I would only have one left after you galloped off into the sunset, and what good is an ostler with only one horse? The poor things have got used to being together and-"

"You can come with us!" The Nord girl's suggestion apparently caught her counterparts as much off guard as it did Arathor. She, blissfully unaware, turned to the Redguard boy. "You always said you wanted a couple more people to come with us, Aden…" The mer had to admit, he was almost inclined to like this girl and her poisonous cheer.

The boy, who was named Aden by the sounds of it, opened his mouth and closed it again rather like a brain-dead fish before he finally blurted: "But we don't know anything about this guy!" and shot a warning glance towards the red-haired Breton. "Come on Finny… We don't even know if he wants to go."

"Of course he does," Finny replied after less than a second's worth of thought on the matter. "You can see it in his eyes… Look…" Arathor decided very quickly that it was quite disconcerting the way that she was staring at him, especially when she had to squint and lean in to do so. "And you didn't know anything about me before you broke into my house and hit me with a wooden sword! You thought I was a ghost!" _An easy mistake to make_. She definitely looked like a ghost, if nothing else. "Hi, I'm Kolfinna Ice-Heart," she said cheerily, extending a hand towards the mer that very nearly hit him. She had been bending in too close and forgot to compensate.

"Arathor," he responded uncertainly. "Samarys…" He included his clan name as an afterthought when he realised that _her_ clan name didn't seem much more fitting than his did. "You don't _seem_ like you have an icy heart," he admitted, taking her hand and shaking it.

Kolfinna giggled. "You never met my father. If I ever drop his name, I know what I'll be given in return… There aren't exactly many people like me around, are there?" She gestured to herself, her white skin seeming almost paler against the deep green of her robes. _No, there most certainly aren't any people like you_. She grinned as though she knew something hilarious. "I could probably ask you why you keep _your_ father's name," she pointed out. "But since you're obviously so thrilled about your Dunmeri heritage, I figured it out already. My father abandoned me." For the first time since she had been speaking, she sounded almost sad. "And I was his legitimate pure-breed daughter… I can only imagine what they must have done to you."

The half-Bosmer shrugged. "It's not so bad, once you get used to it," he lied. _Why am I telling these things to people I've only just met?_

"Liar," she whispered, though she said nothing else. Arathor didn't even try to fight the accusation.

The red-haired Breton cleared her throat loudly. "What about these horses?" she demanded, placing her hands on her hips. Her eyes were a blue so dark that they reminded him of the night sky on a gloomy evening; he found no pleasure looking at them.

"I guess… He could come with us…" Aden muttered after a period of silence, though Arathor could not remember ever saying he wished to go. Finny hugged the boy excitedly. "I mean… Feu?" The Breton girl winced visibly, though the other two did not seem to notice.

"This is your ridiculous quest," she spat viciously. "But I swear on Mara's holy name that if you plan on picking up every single wastrel we encounter then I'm staying right here."

"_Wastrel_?" the mer was not easily offended after the years of abuse he had received for his obscure parentage, but never before had anyone called him a _wastrel_. "You don't know anything about me."

"All the more reason not to trust you." She was adamant in that, at least, and folded her arms again, fingers of her right hand brushing against the hilt of her blade. "You've lived outside of our city for Akatosh only knows how long, and yet we know nothing about you. That means you've obviously got something to hide."

Arathor opened his mouth to reply to her, but Kolfinna cut him off. "No, it's called being different," she stated. She sounded almost serious, even though all he'd seen of her so far had been jovial. "It's called people being ashamed of you…" Her eyes fell. Blue eyes, so pale they were almost as colourless as her skin. "My father kept me hidden for ten years, took me far away from Skyrim, lived with me in Kvatch for a month or so and then left me here alone in a locked house with a couple of bags of food and a blanket. All because of _this_." She pulled her sleeve up her arm to expose her snowy skin to the soft morning sunlight; even now it seemed to reflect the light and the ostler had to look away to stop himself hurting his eyes. "Having people be ashamed of you tends to make you ashamed of yourself. I loved my father and he treated me like an abomination." She rounded on the Breton abruptly. "The only thing different about you is your hair, and even then it's still a normal enough colour to go unnoticed… Imagine if you were only half Breton. Imagine if you had been born with no colour to speak of. Being different and being afraid of judgement is not a crime…"

The mer felt an uncanny desire to embrace her comfortingly for what she had said and the genuineness behind it. "Kolfinna…" he started.

"Finny." She smiled at him.

"_Finny_," he corrected himself. "I think you might be the most colourful person I know." She was as well. Not colourful in the sense of being brightly coloured – nobody could be less so, save for her bright pink hair that she had achieved by mistake – but more colourful in that she was unpredictable and amusing and strangely interesting to speak with. Arathor found himself liking her instantly.

The girl grinned. "That's just tacky."

"He's right though," Aden muttered in agreement. "You are, Finn, very much so."

"I really don't know about that," she chuckled. "So, Arathor, are you coming with us?"

The mer in question blinked. "You do know that you never told me where you were going, don't you? What am I agreeing to? A trek to Akavir? A whiz up and down the Gold Road? A journey into remote Orsinium? A romp down to Leyawiin?"

"We're going to the Imperial City!" Finny told him.

"To find the Hero of Kvatch," the Redguard finished for her.

_The Hero of Kvatch_. Yes, Arathor had heard about her. The woman who stopped this town from being razed to the ground not ten years past, a shadowy figure that almost nobody seemed to know or care about. Some people said she was a Dunmer, while others were not entirely sure, but they all said that she was dressed in black leather with a hood covering most of her face and two deadly swords. Some stories were more far-fetched than others, it had to be said, and all the ostler knew he had heard from strange merchants headed up to Kvatch to buy or sell, looking up at the walls and proclaiming all that they knew about this mysterious figure. He had heard other stories too… "Isn't she dead?"

"Probably," the redhead admitted, tapping her foot impatiently. "Come _on_." She threw a glance at the gates of Kvatch as though she were running from something, but the ostler made no attempt to even guess as to what.

"But there aren't any other ostlers around here…"

The Breton scowled. "How many years have you been here?"

"Three… Maybe four…"

"And how many horses have you sold in that time?"

"Ah." If anything, his lack of reply spoke more volumes than any words ever could, but eventually he gave her a reply. "None, actually. I turned up here with four horses, and four years later I still have four horses. It would be sad to see them go…" For the first time since they have turned up, he left his doorway and paced slowly across to his paddock, clambering over the fence in a less fluid manner than before. Beneath his feet the ground felt familiar, soft and peaty, springy and likewise firm. The animals that had been his life were still dozing beneath their makeshift shelter, but it was still only just dawn, so he could not fault them for it. He knew them all by sight and by name, and they all recognised him; there was no way he would let three of them go and be able to sleep soundly when eventually he lay his head down to sleep. If nothing else, he would go for the love of his horses, the family he never really had, the only things that accepted him regardless of his racial traits. His customers were waiting expectantly next to the fence. "I'll go," he spoke quietly, losing his words to the breeze, and yet somehow they still heard him.

"_Finally_…"

Arathor straightened up and took a long look at his little wooden house. He had built it himself with very little help once he had finally obtained permission from the council of Kvatch to set up a stables for them, made of timber to spite the Bosmer on a foundation of ashes for the Dunmer, the sort of thing that would go unnoticed unless somebody knew enough about him – the number of such people was abnormally small, and none of them lived in Cyrodiil. "Rain's coming," he told them, strolling back to meet them. They were an odd trio, the type you might see once in a lifetime, an ordinary Redguard, a red-haired Breton and an albino Nord. "You probably don't want to be out in this." The Redguard and Nord were both taller than him, but they were the two he settled his eyes upon. There was something about that Breton that made him feel horribly uncomfortable…

"It's only water. We're going now." Another glance towards the gate. This girl was either running or considering staying; the half-Bosmer suspected that it was both. _What are you running from_? He wanted to ask her. But he daren't. Not her. He had run too, once… Maybe she had the same reasons he did… "Are you going to bother selling us those animals or not?"

Considering this, Arathor shook his head. "Not much point if I'm coming with you. Let me get my stuff…" He hopped over the fence and walked back into his little home, but looking around there was scarcely a thing there that he felt a great deal of inclination to take with him; the others looked like they pretty well had what they were standing in, and they were sensible things like leather jerkins and warm robes and swords… Yes, even half-Bosmer-that-got-mistaken-for-vampires needed weapons, didn't they? He found the iron dagger that he'd had for many years in the same spot that he'd left it for many years, though its age was showing and it was flecked with rust, but without a whetstone that was about as good as it was going to get. Looking pointedly at his naked feet, he pulled on some doeskin shoes after brushing off some of the dirt with the palm of his hand; it was a strange sensation to be wearing shoes again after all this time and he felt an extreme urge to rip the things back off again and burn them in the fires of Oblivion, but he refrained. He peeled off the filthy shirt he was wearing and threw it onto the floor, venturing into his one small cupboard and garbing himself in an olive green shirt with a wine stain down the front that he made some feeble attempt to tuck into his breeches, pathetic things that were ripped off as soon as they reached his mid-calf – he couldn't do better than them, though; he had never been a practical enough person to repair his clothes and had never dared to ask somebody for help. Finally, he wrapped a brown woollen cloak around his shoulders and fastened it beneath his neck; it was too long for him and as a result the hem at the bottom was caked in mud, but it was warm and that was all that mattered. As an afterthought, he picked up five apples, a tiny loaf of bread, the remnants of a bottle of cheap wine, a small bag of coins and his copy of _Notes on Racial Phylogeny_, which he stuffed carelessly into a sack. There was really nothing else here that he had ever felt a great deal of connection to.

When he stepped back outside it was raining, as he had said it would, a light trickle that was more irritating than anything else. His new companions were waiting for him almost exactly where he had left them, which was a relief, given that they could easily have stolen his horses and been well away by now. Arathor saddled his animals. "Do you think that I ought to tell someone that I'm leaving?" he asked, voicing a question that only came into his mind when he chanced to glance at the city walls as he did so.

"I could go and tell my aunt…" Aden offered, clearly angling to run back through his city one last time before he departed. "She's on the council and-"

The Breton girl cut him off. "Do you think they really care that much? It's not like he does anything for our city."

"What is your problem?" the ostler hissed at her before he had a chance to keep his own tongue in check. He almost regretted speaking too, until he saw the look of surprise on her face that almost made it worth it.

She held her tongue.

Arathor sighed. "Well, I guess it's not essential that people know I'm gone. Very few people pass through here, and all I seem to do is watch horses for an hour or two at a time. All save these four…" He handed reins to Finny and Aden before turning back to the Breton girl. "You're not the first person to be biased against me," he admitted, forcing himself to smile as he handed her the reins of his third horse. "But it's their quest, not ours, and whether or not we're both running from something it doesn't really matter, because we're really both going for them and because of them. So whatever you may think of me… Well, it doesn't really matter. My name is Arathor - I don't answer to Bastard or Abomination or Vampire; pleased to meet you."

"Eleanor," she grumbled. "Eleanor Renault." She clambered onto her mount deftly enough, but once she was up there it was clear she was uncomfortable; the half-Bosmer could tell she had never ridden before.

"Everyone calls her Feu though," Finny stated in a rather over dramatic manner. She was whiter than the horse was, and it made for a strange image to see her up there, her green robes growing darker as they soaked with water to contrast even further. The only way the picture could have got odder was if she had taken her hood down.

"And what would you prefer to be called, Miss Renault?" Arathor swung himself up into the saddle with ease. He had kept his favourite horse for himself, a white-grey mare that he had named Cloud one day when he was at a loose end.

For a moment, Eleanor seemed shocked that he had ever asked the question. "Everyone calls me Feu," she begrudgingly admitted, though she was clearly not best pleased with this prospect. "But very few non-Bretons can pronounce it. I don't think anyone has called me Eleanor in ten years… Not to my face, anyway. Call me either one, I'll answer to both."

"But which would you _prefer_?" the half-Bosmer insisted. "I never asked you what other people call you or which you answer to. I asked you which one _you_ would personally rather be called."

"Eleanor," she confessed, shooting a look at the other two. "Nobody can pronounce that nickname correctly…" The horse shifted beneath her and she whimpered, clinging to the saddle for dear life.

"How in Mara's name did you expect to get to the Imperial City if you don't even want the horse to move?" Arathor chuckled as she turned the colour of beetroots in embarrassment. "You've got to move with her, not against her, or else you'll fall off. She's a good one, is little Mist…" He patted Eleanor's horse affectionately. "She's not like to chuck you off, but she's not gonna be alright with you up there until you relax. Stressing about it will just stress her out; I've never known her bolt, but I'm the only one that's ever ridden her and she's known me pretty well since she was a foal."

"Can't you give me one of the others then?"

The ostler shook his head. "Mist's about the only one I would trust with you. She's a good horse. Drift used to bolt a lot when she was younger; she doesn't anymore, but I can't be certain how she'd react around new people… Chalk… She's good, but I've been thrown off her more times than I can count over the years – she's grown out of it, mind you, but I wouldn't give her to someone who wasn't confident… And Cloud here? This girl took longest to break in… Years and years. I wouldn't trust her with anybody else for at least another couple of years yet, when I know I can count on her to behave nicely. I hope you two are alright…" he said to Finny and Aden. They looked more secure, at least, whether they had ridden before or not.

"Your knowledge of your animals is pretty impressive," the Redguard conceded. He was riding Chalk; Arathor had decided that that would be a good choice, since he was taller and stronger than both of the women and more likely to be able to cope if the mare got funny with him.

"You spend long enough with 'em and you learn to understand 'em," the mer shrugged in reply. "They're easier to understand than people, anyway, and they're less likely to run away if they think you're a vampire. Horses don't care if you have green eyes or blue eyes or red eyes, or if your mother was a different race to your father. You feed 'em and care for 'em and then they'll accept you for who you are, not what you look like. You three had better take good care of my girls," he warned them, tying his sack to the front of his saddle and then placing its bulk in his lap; it was sodden by now, and he hoped that nothing inside would get ruined.

For somebody who had never ridden before, Eleanor picked it up quickly enough, though she was never brilliant and sometimes she faltered. Arathor had a feeling she was scared of falling from Mist's back, but when he tried to reassure her she snapped at him and denied having any fear whatsoever. Descending from the city's plateau was probably the most difficult thing he could have asked her to do; the track was narrow and wound its way down the cliff side like a serpent, zigzagging left and right and left again, over a flat ledge that the refugees from Kvatch had taken shelter on immediately after the event and down onto the Gold Road. The Breton had her eyes shut by the time they reached the bottom – though she denied that fervently as well – so the ostler had told the other two to dismount and lead their animals down, which would have been decidedly safer. He led Mist and Cloud himself, leaving Eleanor clinging to her saddle as though she would die if she let go.

"Well," Aden laughed as he pulled himself back into the saddle. "This is the furthest I've ever been from home…" It was strange, really, that nobody in Kvatch ever seemed to leave. Perhaps it was understandable that they would stick together after they went through some horrific event as a group, but Arathor did not know why they were all still stuck up there ten years on. They were like a little exclusive club up there, nobody joining, nobody leaving, no outsiders understanding.

"Welcome to the rest of the world."

Kvatch was probably the most unusual of the cities in Cyrodiil. It was perched high up on its own little mountain away from everything, nestled tightly in between the Gold Coast and the West Weald and yet reaping the benefits of neither. County Kvatch was located north of the city, though it could take almost half a day to reach it from the gates of the city unless one learned how to scale a sheer cliff edge or simply to fly, and that too seemed to be between the Gold Coast and the Colovian Highlands. The Gold Road ran east to west between Anvil and Skingrad, and somehow Kvatch had tacked itself right in between them, though it was missed by nearly all of the major traders.

There were nine major cities in Cyrodiil, which made sense if one were to consider their religion but no sense if one glanced at a map; the province might have been circular, if not for Valenwood and Elsweyr, and the Imperial City would have been at its centre, the heart of the Empire and the jewel in the crown, built on an island in the middle of Lake Rumare. The other eight cities might have fanned around it equally, if not for Valenwood and Elsweyr, but, as it happened, those two provinces did not seem likely to move with any particular urgency, and so Cyrodiil was oddly lop-sided in the distribution of its major cities.

There was Leyawiin in the south and Bruma in the north, yes, and Cheydinhal and Chorrol were dutifully in the north-east and north-west as great sentinels, but that was where the logic ended. Bravil had been built on the wrong shore of the Niben where the Larsius River fed into it and where its townspeople had proceeded to make it smell somewhat akin to a cesspit and have the appearance of a pig-sty; when the old count had died of a sudden fever that had almost wiped out the town his son the skooma-addict had taken over and destroyed the place further. These days, it was almost universally avoided. Skingrad and Kvatch ought to have been built further south in order to give the province some kind of symmetry, but alas it was not to be. Skingrad was a prosperous place even amid the turmoil, kept alive by its mysterious count who most people could not claim to have ever seen in anything other than a painting; people did not complain though, because it was obviously better to live in a town run by an enigma than to be poor elsewhere. Kvatch, for what it was, was doing better than most people had anticipated it would following the battle that had given it its scars; Arathor had headed there because he knew they were keeping out of the province's politics and because he supposed that people there were all too wrapped up in their own sorrows to pay him much notice. He had been right.

Still, he felt a twinge of loss to leave the place, and bade the city a silent farewell.

"Have you ever been to the Imperial City?" Finny asked him after they had been on the road for an hour and were beginning to see the beauty of the West Weald. It smelt clean and fresh, and everywhere he looked Arathor saw greenery and flowers and farmland; the area was fabled for its wine and cheese and tomatoes, he knew, and it was easy to see why.

He had to shake his head. "I've only been in Morrowind and Valenwood and Kvatch," he admitted carefully. "I don't remember much of Morrowind, because my mother left in disgrace pretty well as soon as I was born. Valenwood… Eh, I ticked off the Bosmer and then ran away. Kvatch isn't that far from the border at all." If he had keen enough eyesight, he might have seen it from the Gold Road; a hill lolled away southwards all the way into the province belonging to the Wood Elves. Unfortunately, however, borders were not quite as well defined as they were in maps and were not quite the unbroken black lines they appeared to be, a fact that had plagued him somewhat in his flight. He did not tell them that he had spent time in Anvil in the years following the Oblivion Crisis. It did not seem worth it.

"I saw it once," the Nord said dreamily, gazing at the sky that spotted her with rain. Her skin was brighter than the sky was today. "I was only about five, but I remember a bit. Father moved me around a lot when I was little, to places where he could pretend I didn't exist. After we ran out of places in Skyrim, he came here to Cyrodiil. Bruma… The Imperial City… Skingrad… Kvatch. He would have gone to Bravil after Skingrad if he had not heard that the city was practically alone in the scheme of things; it was the perfect place to put a daughter he was ashamed of and did not want: a place where nobody would think to look, a city on a hill in the middle of two prosperous regions, famed for nothing but its own destruction. He probably went back to Skyrim…"

_What sort of monster would be ashamed of his own child_? He almost asked, until he bit his tongue. He knew exactly what sort of monster; his father had been one of them. "What did he have to be ashamed of?" Arathor knew why _his_ parents were ashamed – he was a half-breed and a bastard to boot – but he could not understand why a true-blood daughter would be scorned for the colour of her skin.

She tilted her head at him, squinting her pale eyes to get a better view. He found himself wondering how far she could actually see. "When you look at me, what do you see?"

"A Nord girl with white skin. That's all that's different about you, your skin… What is shameful about that?"

"That's the point." Though she sounded sad, she was grinning. "I'm a Nord, a child of the sky. The Nords live by their suspicions and their omens; they blame their misfortunes on the Falmer, the Snow Elves. What would be more like a Snow Elf than to turn a little girl white like snow? It was an omen, you see, and a dark one at that. Or that was what my father thought. My mother died birthing me – another ill-fortune associated with my birth, and ultimately the final straw. Children of the sky are not made of snow. He packed me up and ran away, though he probably should have killed me to appease the gods, or something. He was an Ice-Heart, so he should have done, but for some reason he didn't, and here I stand for the entire world to see, a snow-child become a snow-woman, a ghost and an omen. Hopefully not a bad omen for our quest though…"

"Finn," Aden reassured her. "You're not an omen. Personally, I wouldn't change you for the world."

"And that, my friend, is why you're awesome." She _was_ a snow-woman, if there was no other way to describe her; she was tall and robust, by the looks of her – though it was hard to tell beneath the loose robes that she wore – and everything about her was white. Arathor had never seen real snow, but if she was anything to go by… He had to laugh when he realised that he had handed her the reins to Drift, the horse he had named after a snowdrift when he was bored and relaxing on his front porch in a soft dusky glow with an apple in one hand and a scroll that he could not read in the other. It had been from his father, and he had set it on fire before he had managed to grasp his first few letters. Good riddance, he said, though sometimes he would lie awake and wonder what had been on it; it was the only thing his father had ever really _given_ him, save for the red colour of his eyes and a sickly discolouration of his skin.

"Finny, we can be social outcasts together," he chuckled, and she snickered too. The other two remained silent at that.

"You know… I always thought the Dunmer were relatively promiscuous."

_That_ made Arathor cackle, if nothing else. "Yes… Apparently they are." He gestured to himself with a hand. "Living proof." Sniggering, he tried to regain a more serious demeanour. "They are, yeah, but they're also incredibly proud and distrusting of other races. I'm not _exactly_ a legitimate child."

"_So_ distrusting of other races that they fall into bed with them…" he heard Eleanor mutter, though when he looked at her she was far more intent on maintaining her balance. She was less fearful than she had been, but even the slightest excess rocking made her grasp for the saddle to steady herself.

"Well some people _do_ trust others further than they can throw them." If nothing else, it was a subtle dig at her obvious dislike for him. "I never asked my parents how they ended up… Well, conceiving me. I'm never going to ask either. Some things are best left unknown."

"Yes," the Breton agreed. "Perhaps it would be best if we never find out what happened to our Hero… We might not like what we hear."

Aden shook his head, though he conceded the fact that she might well be dead and that their journey would therefore be for nothing. "I think it will be better to know than to wonder and wish that we did. Knowledge of this sort cannot be _that_ damaging. I met her, and spoke to her, and she told me her name. She was not as bad as people said she was, and if nothing else then we owe her to prove that to the rest of Nirn, don't we? We need to find out _why_ the history books all but omit her, and we need to right that terrible wrong. She deserved better, no matter what became of her."


	4. Robert

_Chapter 4_

It was spitting insistently, and Robert was already dripping with every step he took, the droplets streaming in rivulets down his arms. He didn't mind though; the feeling was mildly comforting and reminded him that he was still here, not lost, still himself. He hadn't felt the rain in a long time, and this he welcomed with open arms.

The water dribbling through his mud-coloured hair and pushed it into his eyes; he left it for a few short moments, before raising a hand to brush it away – it was cold and thin and soaked through, shot with grey from years of abusing his body. Robert bit his lip as his entire limb shook throughout its journey up to his face, and when it got there he could taste the coppery familiar taste of blood that he licked away instinctively.

Skingrad was hiding from the weather, he knew. They always hid when it rained, or they had… before. He staggered between the narrow alleyways where the balconies leaned so close that they almost kissed, fingers finding the walls as his feet trudged onwards along the drenched cobblestones. His feet would be black by now.

He was hungry though, so hungry that he felt his stomach would collapse in on itself if he didn't find something to fill it with. The rain meant that he couldn't smell the smells that usually guided him along during his stupor, but even his bleary eyes could make out some of the pathway. "N-n-need ta…" He tried to collect himself. He was dressed like a lord, save the shoes that he had lost, so he should act like one. _Lords have food to eat_. But he wasn't a lord; he just dressed like one. "Grapes," he whispered. Skingrad was famous for them and there were vineyards surrounding the bleak grey walls, though since the anarchy had begun it had been difficult to find grapes that had not been claimed for some lord or other. _I'm a lord_. Robert shook his head. _No, I'm not._

By the time he had stumbled to the bridges over the road that led through the centre of the city, his feet were bloody. He could see the crimson footprints that followed him with every step he took, though he could hardly comprehend that they were his own. The eastern bridge, part of him supposed - a part that had not spoken in some time; the rest of him merely leant heavily on the brick wall that flanked it and looked over, trying to find a way down. His hands were cracked and blistered and they shook – why did they always shake? – to the extent that he had once tried to cut them off with a knife. They had shaken though, and he had failed with only a scar to show for his efforts.

"Food," he mumbled as he propelled himself down the northern bank between the inner wall and the road. His feet snagged on more stones, but he barely felt them, and his velvet breeches became stained with grass as he slipped the last couple of feet. Robert was always confused when he returned, and this time he'd been gone longer than normal.

The guards on the door shot him strange looks, but he barely noticed, limping a little on his mangled toes. It was a fruitless journey though; Tamika and the Surilie Brothers had all placed armed guards on their vineyards to protect them from thieving hands and any soldiers that might pass this way from Anvil expecting to feed themselves without paying. It had happened before.

Defeated, Robert slumped to the ground, his knees pulled into his chest, and only then did he notice his bleeding feet. They were black and crooked and scarred like this had happened before. _It has happened before_. He covered his head with his hands and screwed up his eyes, trying to drown out the voices. _I'm a lord, get up_. "N-N-No," the man whimpered. "I'm not a l-l-l-l-l-lord, I…" _Maybe _you_ are not a lord. Get up, I can find you food_. "G-Go away." His voice wavered and cracked. _No, Robert, it is you who ought to go away_. He cringed; that Geoff put such a persuasive edge on his voice that he almost wanted to give in… Life was so much easier when Geoff was in charge; he wasn't pathetic and confused, and he was good at tricking people, everything Robert wasn't. But now Robert was becoming less and less frequent. He shook his head as firmly as he could, choosing rather to focus on the rain than listen to any more of Geoff's nonsense. "I-I-I-I'm in ch-charge G-G-Geoff," he stuttered. "It's my b-b-b-body."

But he knew it wasn't. Robert had been sharing his skin with a whole host of other people for years now, a thief, and a lord, as well as some he couldn't even pinpoint… He could feel them stirring up inside him whenever he returned and no matter how hard he fought against them they always seemed to win. There were many of them, and only one Robert. Geoff was the dominant character, a man who could get his own way by saying a few words and waving a hand, a man who had friends in high places, who people would talk to in the street and gave off an air of easy sophistication. Geoff had all the charisma that Robert lacked, to the extent that sometimes he had the man himself convinced that he ought to give up and submit, make himself the secondary feature within this body, or the tertiary, or the quaternary; he knew he could never be lost completely, but he could shrink away into near nothingness and hide for the rest of his days.

Inside, Geoff was laughing. _You know that you don't, Robert_, he muttered softly. If he had his own body, he would have folded his arms and shaken his head, but as it was Robert was having to fight him to keep his limbs still. He tightened his arms around his knees and pressed his face into them. _I will find you food and then you can have your precious body back_, the lord promised sourly. "Liar," Robert hissed at him. Last time Geoff had made that promise, he had been in control for almost a month.

_Oh, Robert…_ the voice in his head chuckled sinisterly. _I do so hate it when you force me to push you out. It would be so much simpler to submit_. The man shook his head. "This is my body," he said as firmly as he could. "I-I'm stronger than you think I am."

In his head, the troops were lining up, rows and rows of them. The lord was powerful and had thousands at his command, in surcoats of red, gold and green with lances and swords and they sat astride destriers with powerful muscles and perfect training. On the other side, a rabble of sellswords and mercenaries, half of whom had been bought by the opposition already to stab their leader at the first opportunity. Ranks of unblooded boys and ancient men whose limbs were shot with arthritis, armed with pitchforks and armoured with boiled leather at most. It would be a slaughter, Robert knew, unless some kind of miracle occurred.

When the war horn was blown by one of the men on the other side, his merry band of cravens cowered and flinched, and readied themselves. _Give up_, Geoff implored him. As he closed his mahogany eyes he was standing inside a tent, parlaying with a man who looked identical to him, only better dressed. He felt almost uncomfortable in his lordly clothes that had been shredded to rags, while the other man looked resplendent and well-groomed. _You can save your people_. The man's mouth moved a few seconds after he heard the words, giving the whole area a surreal slow feeling. He oozed confidence, and his voice was soft and sweet. Robert could tell that Geoff's guards had been ordered to slay him at the first sign of trouble. _All you have to do is submit and not one of them will be harmed. Engage this folly and they will all die, I will see to that personally_.

He turned, and the tent setting faded into the battle lines where his men were waiting for their leader. Some smiled when they saw him, but most simply grimaced, staring across the plain at the sea of colours that were their enemy. He could not name a single man, and yet he felt like he knew them all. "_All you gotta do is bend yer knee_," one of his soldiers was saying, his voice reverberating in a dreamlike fashion. "_You can rise again later_."

"Can I?" Robert whispered. He wasn't so sure anymore. Every time he gave up his position to let Geoff or one of the others take control it was growing harder and harder to re-establish himself to a point where he could fight back, and there was no way he could persuade anyone the way the lord could, no way he could pay men for their fealty, no way he could earn their respect and win their love.

Back outside his mind, he pushed himself back to his feet and stumbled towards the city again. If he could not find food, at least he could find water, and his throat was burning as though he had not drunk in days. This time the guards on the gate said something to him that he could not hear because he was struggling to ignore the voices in his head; it was probably something unimportant like 'Your feet are bleeding' or 'You look awful'. That was what they usually said. Once upon a time they had said other things to him, things about how he looked like he had the eyes of a trained marksman, or that he had a spring in his step. But that was before…

"Go away Geoff," he muttered when he heard the man speaking to him again. At least if he focussed on moving around there was no way the lord could simply take over while he was not paying attention. He merely ignored the words. For some reason, he could never remember what the lord did with his body, while Geoff seemed to know absolutely everything; it scared him, somewhat.

Right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot... "Hello?" The voice behind him made him jump and snap from his stupor, almost losing his grip on his body as he felt Geoff attempting to force his way in during the moment of weakness. He blinked rapidly and turned to face the speaker, only to find himself confronted with four white horses; when he looked up, he spied the riders and stumbled backwards, dumping himself on the ground and sending a pang of pain through his wrist. "Are you alright?"

"I..." He couldn't tell which one of them was speaking. They looked so far away from down here, and... He shrieked when one of the horses moved its hoof a little closer to him while shifting its weight. "Y-Yes," he managed, scrambling upright and making a pitiful attempt of dusting himself off. "H-Hello."

"Are you sure you're alright?" One of them dismounted, a phantom in a green robe, colourless and yet so real. He could hear a woman's voice, but all he could see was a ghost. He quivered. "You looked like you hurt your wrist when you fell. I know some healing spells that could help you, if you want." She reached towards him, and he shrank away.

"You're a g-g-ghost!" he whispered, wincing backwards. He had learnt long ago that you never let ghosts touch you; they were cold as ice, they would kill you at the first opportunity, they... "Argh!" he shrank to the ground, clutching his head. Geoff was talking again, louder and louder, banging his war-drums impatiently, playing his bugles, and shouting, shouting, shouting...

He felt a hand on his arm that made him leap with fright. "I'm not a ghost," the white woman reassured him gently. She wasn't cold. That was wrong... She was a ghost, she should be... A strange, tingling feeling spread through his arm down to his wrist and then up into his head, leaving his mind clearer than it had been in a long time. Somehow, the ghost had quieted Geoff to little more than a whisper. "See? Is that better?" She sounded like she was addressing a small child, but Robert barely noticed. He nodded quickly, but refused to look at her face. It was pale, too pale, scarily pale, and her eyes were almost white, terrifying... "My name is Finny. What's yours?"

A name, a name... What was his name? "Robert," he whispered. He _was_ still Robert, he was sure of that; nobody else had slipped in control when he hadn't been paying attention. Had they? "I-I... I think."

"He _thinks_?" a voice up on one of the horses asked. It was full of scorn and made him wince and cringe again. "Oh, Finny, how do you _find_ these people?"

"I'd shut up, Eleanor, or you might find that little Mist suddenly bolts from beneath you," someone replied, a male voice. The scornful woman held her silence, but Robert could _feel_ her seething, could taste it in the air.

"Y-Yes," he whispered. "My name is Robert. But some… sometimes Geoff is in… my head and I can…" He covered his ears as the drums picked up their rhythm even louder than they had before the not-a-ghost had touched him, and he was back inside his mind, standing in that parley tent before the lord. _I gave you fair warning, Robert_, the man was tutting, shaking his head and laughing, laughing. _I suppose you want them to die_. _They will lose faith, I assure you, once the first few are slaughtered the others will surrender or run_…

"Robert? _Robert?_" The voice cut through his thoughts and he was back in Skingrad, the white girl standing over him as he lay curled up on the floor. How he had got in that position he didn't recall. "Are you alright?"

"G-G-G-Geoff is… Geoff… He's…" He couldn't find the words. Had the lord stolen his words too? In this situation the lord would be able to talk his way out of it, make the ghostling go away, and all her friends on those huge, enormous, massive, white, ferocious, savage, terrifying beasts of destruction. He saw the hands that picked him up before he felt them, brown skinned and attached to long muscular arms; they held him like a baby as he quivered.

A tent again. White walls flapping. The sound of drums. A flash of fire… The parley tent was aflame and he was inside, paralysed, looking out as the fabric burnt and cinders rained down on him in great handfuls. Outside he saw the wave of red, gold and green surge forward and swamp his little band. He felt their pain as the spears and lances tore into their flesh, felt every wound they took, felt every life expire. When his paralysis ended, Robert was on the floor of the tent in a pool of blood that was not his own but spreading from his body, thick and crimson. Geoff had been right. The survivors had abandoned him in his time of need.

The lord stood over him mockingly. _I hate to say I told you so, Robert, but some people just never learn, do they? How many more must I put to sword before you give up?_ White hot agony flared through his body as another three men went down dead and he writhed senselessly on the ground, trying to douse the pain as the scarlet spread.

But a sudden moment of clarity hit him hard. "You can't take this body unless I submit, can you?" he rasped, managing not to stutter through paying particular attention to every word as it left his lips, in case he might not be in full control. Geoff's muddy brown eyes widened a little. "You're not more powerful than me," Robert continued. "You don't have the will or the substance to take over unless I give it to you. You think that I will just roll over? You think that if I am tortured enough I will let you have your way? Well no, Geoff. I say no."

Warmth rushed over him, and he was staring at the ghostling again, still being cradled by those strong brown arms. He shifted and the arms put him down on the ground, where he immediately got to his feet. He could see more clearly now, feel more keenly; the glow on his skin told him it was magic, and the sheen around the ghostling's fingers told him that it was her doing. There were two more, sitting on white horses: one with hair of fire and one with red eyes like a vampire. The brown arms belonged to a tall man - far taller than Robert but scarcely taller than the ghostling – with ebony braids who looked ready enough for battle.

A strange foursome, at least. A ghostling, a vampire, a fire nymph, a mahogany warrior.

The not-a-ghost introduced them. Finny, Arathor, Eleanor (Also called Feu, though this made the fire nymph scowl) and Aden. They were going to the Imperial City, before they had come across him and felt obligated to help the man who was staggering about looking lost and afraid and confused – again the fire nymph scowled at this – and they hoped that he would be alright now that she had weaved a spell for him, though she admitted that her magic was not quite brilliant and may possibly not work as desired.

"Well thank you," he said slowly and carefully, feeling the droplets of rain _as_ they splashed against this face and not afterwards. He brushed his wet hair from his eyes with his fingers. "I'm sorry you had to… see that." But they had helped him realise that he was stronger than Geoff – or had they even had anything to do with it? He couldn't tell – and Finny's not-quite-brilliant magic had restored to him at least some sense. Well, at the end of the day, he could form a sentence without stuttering again, though for how long that would last he daren't speculate. The lord was roiling in his head, angry beyond belief, killing all of Robert's men to make him feel better. He felt their pain as before, but he was virtually numb to it now that he had control of his own senses again.

"You're crazy," muttered the fire nymph whom people called Eleanor, though he could see that her knuckles had turned white from clinging to the horse she was riding. Was she scared of the animal itself or falling from it? He couldn't tell.

"I'm not," he replied in a low voice. "Or I… I wasn't, once. My, er… My arms… started shaking and I couldn't pull a bow anymore, got kicked out, and then there was some… skooma. Don't do skooma, it's bad for you, it does things to your mind. That's when Geoff first…" He stopped to look at them, noting the confused expressions on their faces. "Geoff is… like me… Well, he's in my…" He stuck two fingers into his temple, to indicate his brain. "He… Sometimes I lose myself a little, and Geoff steps in and takes over. He's like me, but… But like the complete opposite; he's confident and loud, and… People _like_ Geoff, really. I always thought he was stronger than me, but… But I was wrong. I… I never used to be crazy. But you can say that I am now… You're probably right." He looked closely at them all. "You're probably too young to know anything about the Oblivion Crisis, but I was in the Battle of Bruma… Before… Before Geoff… Before all the others."

The ghostling gasped. "You were in the _Battle of Bruma_?" she squeaked in excitement. When he looked closer, he saw that she was just a Nord with extremely pale skin, though she _did_ look a great deal like a ghost from afar; for a minute he swore he saw a wisp of bright pink hair beneath her hood as well, but he shook his head at the absurdity.

Robert nodded. "I was an archer. Formed up at the top of the valley with a bow in one hand and a quiver of arrows at my hip…"

"Did you see the Hero of Kvatch?" the ghostling demanded, cutting him off mid sentence.

"Yeah, but not for long. She didn't say anything to us, but she walked all the way up the hill to get some little Argonian friend of hers to say stuff for her. He was a good speaker, that lizard, and a nice guy. What's she to you? You're too young to know what happened, surely."

The brown-skinned warrior spoke for the first time in a smooth, low voice. "We are survivors of Kvatch," he said, gesturing to himself and the fire nymph. "She saved us. I met her once; she told me her name… We're trying to find out what happened to her. You don't know anything, do you?"

He shook his head. "I took a blow to the head during the battle on some Dremora's shield. Cracked my skull open, fell down the hill… I don't know anything about the end of the battle or the aftermath until about a month later, and by then the Oblivion Crisis was over, they told me, because Martin Septim smashed the Amulet of Kings. All I know is that when I woke up my arms would shake, and there were voices in my head. I couldn't do anything; I was useless… And then there was skooma… The first time I tried it was the first time Geoff took over. Say, that magic you did… Will it last?"

The girl sighed heavily when she shook her head, as though he had just placed a huge weight on her chest. "Alas, no," she said, apologising sincerely. "I'm not good at magic. Not enough to know how to make spells permanent or non-permanent." She pushed back her hood to reveal bright pink shoulder-length hair that had been pulled roughly into a braid and had small tufts sticking out of it in all directions. "I can only pray that this will fade in time," she muttered, covering it again. It was a strange thing to see, a white skinned girl with pink hair. Robert knew that mages could bend their appearances to their every will, but he had never seen anybody turn hair _pink_ before. The look he gave her must have spoken volumes, because she quickly added: "I was aiming for red. Red and white together make pink, right?" It made a vague amount of sense, at least.

"We should really get going," murmured the brown-skinned warrior to his pink-haired ghost of a companion. "We really don't want to be on the roads when it's dark."

"Do you really think we'll reach the Imperial City before nightfall?" she replied, sounding mildly incredulous as she looked at the sky, her eyes squinting oddly. The clouds made it impossible to tell the time of day.

The fire nymph scoffed. "We might have done if you hadn't made us stop," she growled. "Can we just leave before we end up with _another_ person following us around Tamriel?"

Fluidly, the vampire dismounted from his steed. There was something about him that didn't quite sit right with Robert, though he was fairly sure the mer would not try and suck his blood; he saw the look and showed his teeth, revealing a distinct lack of fangs. Still, there was something almost unsettling in his appearance, with his grey-green-gold skin, blond hair and crimson eyes he looked even more unusual than the pale girl. "I think we should stay here for the night," he said quickly. He had a sack of some kind on his saddle that honestly looked like it contained all he owned in the world.

"Oh, for goodness' sake! Why did you ask me to come on this stupid quest of yours if you're planning to delay at every turn and pick up every idiot we stumble across?" When the horse moved beneath her, she lost all her threatening air by squeaking with fear. Out of the corner of his eye, Robert saw the strange not-vampire smirk at her misfortune.

"We didn't force you to leave Kvatch," the warrior replied flatly, his voice and facial expression betraying not even the slightest hint of his emotions. "You wanted to leave more than any of us. We just gave you the opportunity. You're welcome to leave us if you truly detest our company as much as you appear to." Somewhere in his head Geoff was trying to get his attention, so Robert instead turned his focus to wondering how this man could say such an emotionally charged statement with so little expression in his voice. "We're staying for the night."

The girl scowled and dismounted awkwardly, half falling and half climbing. "I'll be in the chapel," she spat, pushing past the others and heading through the gates into the city.

"I'll go and buy us some rooms in an inn or something…" muttered the man they claimed was called Aden, removing a bag of coins from a saddlebag and heading after her solemnly.

The ghostling turned to Robert. "Are you sure you'll be alright? I would offer that you come with us, but we only have four horses."

For a minute, he thought he heard the curious mer whisper something along the lines of: "He's welcome to Eleanor's," but he brushed it off as his imagination.

The man thought and then nodded carefully. "For now," he admitted, blinking as a raindrop splashed into his eye. "Geoff'll come back, but I only need to remember that I'm stronger than him, right?"

She smiled. It was a nice smile for one who looked so ethereal and – if he looked closely – sinister. There was something in the way that she squinted at everything that made him feel uneasy, and if she hadn't helped him banish Geoff for a while he would have run a mile without thinking. "Of course you're stronger than him. You fought in the Battle of Bruma! What did Geoff do? Take advantage of your weakness… Well he's weak, not you. Think of how many millions of lives were saved by the sacrifices that occurred on the battlefield at Bruma…" Apparently she was a fan.

_Don't listen to her, Robert_. He blinked in pain as the lord's voice split through his head again; it felt as though somebody had shoved a dagger through his brainstem for a few milliseconds, and it was only pure luck that allowed him to stay on his feet – though he swayed dangerously. _You know you can't function without me. When was the last time you found food for yourself? Before too long you'll be _begging_ me to help you, and I will come to your aid out of the goodness of my heart. All this suspicion is helping no one_. Geoff had changed his tactics now, back to suave persuasion now that violence had clearly not worked. Now that he mentioned it, the pit in Robert's empty stomach suddenly came to the forefront of his mind. "Say, do you have any food I c-could have?" He felt his stutter returning and clenched his fists angrily until his left arm started shaking of its own accord.

The ghostling shook her head sadly, but the red eyed mer reached into that sack of his and tossed him an apple. He missed it when his arms twitched, but he was too hungry to let it go to waste so he picked it up and took a bite. It was starting to go soft, but food was food and he savoured the way it tasted. "Th-thank you," he remembered to say between mouthfuls, juice dribbling between his lips as he chewed.

"No problem," replied the not-a-vampire. He turned to the green robed girl. "I'm gonna go put my girls in the stable for the night," he told her, rubbing the neck of the nearest horse affectionately. "If you need me, I'll be there for an hour or so." He departed quickly, taking all four animals with him. Robert relaxed a bit to see them go.

She sighed. "I wish I could help you more."

Robert finished off his apple, core and all, before talking. Somehow having something in his stomach made him feel whole worlds better. "S-Some people can't be helped," he told her. Part of him wanted to break it to her gently, but he couldn't find the words to do so. Geoff would have been able to. "You might have been able to d-do something b-b-before the B-Battle of Bruma, but…" He lifted a shaking arm to his head and moved his hair aside to show her the scar; it was deep, a pit he could feel in his skull, covered in skin but still broken. The healers could only have done so much for him; that he was even alive had been a miracle, they had told him.

"You should go and see Oleta."

"Sorry, who?"

"Oleta," she repeated. "The healer in Kvatch. People say she's the best healer in the whole province. She nursed the city back to health after it got destroyed… If she can do that, she can do anything."

He tilted his head to look at her from a different perspective. "Th-thanks for the advice, but I r-really c-c-can't see me w-walking all the way to Kvatch. B-Besides… I-I-I don't th-think Geoff would approve, and w-what w-would I do if he started creating merry hell in m-my head again? Y-Y-You saw what ha-ha-happened l-last time…"

"Are there others?" she asked suddenly. "Asides Geoff, I mean…" She paused, thinking about what she had just said. "I mean, I don't mean to pry, but-"

Robert raised a hand to cut her off, but it shook oddly and he lowered it again. "Yeah. There are m-m-more, b-but I c-c-c-c-c-couldn't n-name them. G-G-G-Geoff is the main one." His stutter was getting worse again, he could feel it. He had had that before he took the blow to the head, but since then it had become far more pronounced as he had become far more pathetic.

"What are they like?" She stopped again, and then chuckled. "Sorry. I'm not intending on asking you twenty questions, for the record."

He had only felt the aftermath of the others once, and it was an experience he would never, ever forget. "A m-m-m-million times worse." There had been blood last time. He had been covered in it. It wasn't his own, and there was no body it could have come from nearby, but somehow he knew that whoever had been in control had committed a murder. He spent a whole week scrubbing himself raw afterwards, and even then he had still felt unclean and gone to sleep fearful he would lose himself again for the next year and a half. Even now he sometimes had the nightmares.

"I can't even begin to fathom how terrible something like that must have been…" she said, trying to comfort him. "It's amazing how little we think about our heroes these days… You helped save our whole way of life, and now… We've failed you, haven't we? All the people who benefitted from your actions should have done something to… Well, to at least thank you, right?"

Robert shook his head. "M-most of us j-just w-w-w-wanted to forget the whole th-thing. W-W-We saw m-m-more deaths than it's healthy to… S-S-Some people were b-beyond help. It's not your f-f-fault. I'd d-do it again. I know w-what g-good we did for Cyrodiil and T-Tamriel." He meant it too. As much as he hated what that blow to the head had made him, he had seen over the years what good had come of the sacrifices he had made and seen on that battlefield. Maybe there ought to have been a better way to end the Oblivion Crisis than Martin Septim giving his life – that little escapade had only led to almost a decade of anarchy and power struggle as people tried to take the throne for themselves – but he knew why things had happened as they did.

Even Geoff could not argue that point.

* * *

><p><em>Author Note: OK, sorry this chapter took so long and isn't much to show for it. Robert was a tricky character to get to grips with, and I'll admit that I put off writing this in favour of reading Fallout: Equestria for a LONG time (Though, to be honest, I never finished the story. I'll have to do that soon...). Let me know if I did him any justice, alright?<em>


	5. Septimus

_Chapter 5_

Turdas. Somehow it was always Turdas when things went wrong around the Imperial City, and today was no exception. Early in the morning a robbery had been discovered in the Market District, throwing the whole area into chaos as accusations flew about faster than leaves caught in a tornado, and after that the Sintav and Atius clans in the Elven Gardens District had kicked their feud up another level as one of the Sintav boys was stabbed in the street. Nobody could even remember what started the feud, but it wasn't likely to end quickly; it had already been raging for almost fifteen years, and had probably started with some petty disagreement from even before the fires of Oblivion came. Both families had been burned in the fire, but somehow afterwards the dispute had been rekindled even before the buildings had been repaired.

Imperial Watch Captain Septimus Serocold paced the streets slowly as he had done for the past decade and, as he had every day beforehand, remembered the heat of the burning buildings and the sting of injury. He could recall every detail of it, from the first gate to Oblivion to the Avatar of Akatosh that still stood proudly in the Temple of the One, roaring into the sky, forever immortalised in stone. Every day he would visit the dragon to pay his respects to the great man - who would have made an even greater Emperor – who sacrificed his blood for them that day. It gave him small comfort to think that somewhere out there maybe Martin Septim was listening.

But Turdas was always the worst day of his week. The day when, if something was going to go wrong, it would go wrong. One fateful Turdas he had lost two good guardsmen when the Dark Brotherhood came prowling for lives to extinguish, and if thieves were ever going to plan a raid, they somehow all managed to plan them to occur on Turdas.

The thieves he could deal with. Once upon a time what felt like a lifetime ago, Septimus had been approached by the Grey Fox with an offer that was almost too good to be true, but because of that help she had given him he allowed her to steal from the city without punishment, as long as it was irregular enough so that people did not make the connection. Ten years on, he almost regretted making that deal; she always decided that she was going to going about living up to it on Turdas.

"It was all for the best though," he told himself wearily as he patrolled the Arboretum. Every step of this city was familiar to him now, every crack in the pavement, every chip in the stonework, every scorch mark on the tall white walls. After ten years here walking the same paths over and over, it was difficult for something new to appear without him noticing.

He was a stranger to himself these days. In the days when he had had a cause to fight for he had been spritely and enthusiastic to do his duty, a perfect soldier who protected people without thinking of his own safety; now years of solving petty quarrels had drained him, and he very seldom went beyond the call of duty as he had once done. He had always wanted to travel to the Imperial City and be a part of the Imperial Watch… But that was before Martin Septim had died. Now there was no real point to his being here.

Septimus walked briskly between the trees. During the Battle for the Imperial City the plants had caught fire and turned the entire district into an inferno; the white walls were completely black from about six feet upwards, where people had tried to wash them clean over the years and failed or given up. The earth beneath his feet was still charred as well, though shoots of green covered it now like a soft, holey blanket. Some small trees were growing as well, saplings, shadows of those which had been there before. When he looked up he could still see the statues of the Nine Divines that lined the pathway, though none of them had survived intact; some were covered in thick layers of soot that hadn't budged even in the rainy deluge three years previously, some had lost arms or other extremities, and the statue of Zenithar – nearest to the Palace District – had been completely crushed when a portion of the wall was dislodged by a fireball leaving only a pair of stone feet and legs below the knee atop a high plinth.

It was almost sacrilegious.

Sometimes people would question whether the statues of the Nine ought to be rebuilt and restored. 'They didn't help us at all,' the people would say, as if they had been there at the Battle of Bruma, or the Battle for the Imperial City. Septimus had been at both, one of few survivors, and he knew the power of the gods, both Aedra and Daedra. Mehrunes Dagon causing destruction, Sheogorath wreaking havoc, and Akatosh bringing them forth a victory from the ashes of a terrible defeat. All because of Martin…

Watch Captain Serocold kept Martin Septim as his personal deity, mostly, even if the one-time heir to the Tamrielic throne have never truly achieved apotheosis. The man deserved to be worshipped, after all he gave up for his people. And if not him, then…

She had fallen through the cracks of history, but she had _wanted_ to. She didn't want to be remembered or revered or worshipped. It was always her desire to be forgotten, to be lost… But she was their nameless saint, their Hero of Kvatch. A woman shrouded in mystery and cloaked in darkness. She still saved them, though. Saved everyone. Everyone except herself…

Septimus shook his head to expel the thought. There was no point dredging up the past now, and especially not here. The Imperial City had sapped him of his once naïve enthusiasm for his duty and for battle, yes, but that did not stop him from performing them daily, rain or shine. It was his job to keep his head clear as he patrolled, so that he might keep the people safe from themselves. And on Turdas more than any other day.

He continued his patrol into the Temple District. It was probably the most difficult sector of the city for him to enter and remain focussed on his tasks. They had rebuilt the houses almost identically to what they had been before, but repairing the pavements had taken longer and been more difficult due to the enormous amounts of damage caused by falling masonry and the gargantuan feet of a towering Daedric Prince. This was the place where the final push for victory has occurred, the place where Martin had given up his blood, and where the Hero of Kvatch had been slain. Nobody had seen her die, but they all knew she would have gone on her own terms; she had been wounded even before the battle had begun, a grievous injury to her throat that they claimed she had gained in a fight with Mankar Camoran. It was difficult to know the truth, however; she had severed her windpipe, and when it was fixed with magic she still found talking too difficult to attempt unless the need was great. The only person she might have spoken to was gone as well… Septimus didn't know where to, but he hoped it was somewhere far away.

The Elder Council had never recovered from the assassination at that boy's hands… But Serocold couldn't have let him die with a clean conscience; not after all he did for Cyrodiil.

Fallout from the prisoner's escape had been massive, with search parties sent all over the province, but the newly-promoted Watch Captain had been expecting that. And when the searchers drew a blank he thanked the Nine that the boy had actually heeded the advice he had been given rather than following his heart back to Bruma, or – even worse – back into the Imperial City. Septimus and his partner in crime, battlemage Murz gra-Yazgash, had held their breath during the tense period when the hunters were out, but they could breathe easily again when, after around a month of exploration, the Imperial Legion Commander had called them off.

"You've been in this game too long, Sep," he told himself under his breath. His body was beginning to tell him the same – the brown colour of his hair was leaching through to grey, and sometimes walking his route would leave him exhausted. He hadn't seen his half-century yet, but it was fast approaching, and he had been a guardsman for most of that time. "You should have stayed in Cheydinhal." At least there he had not been expected to give orders, or travel the same track repeatedly; if he had done that in his old home town, he would have left furrows in the ground from his footfall. His assignment in Cheydinhal had been to guard the house of a Dark Elf who had been unable to pay his fines to Ulrich Leland – a punishment which Septimus could not morally agree to, but he had been so keen to fulfil his duty that he had not questioned – and he had itched to be one of the men patrolling the city. Now he itched to go back there.

"… _Do you even know where we would find any information on the Hero of Kvatch?_" Years of guard work had taught him to listen without hearing, but something in that voice made him drop his stride. "_Have they honestly dragged us all the way here when they have no plan whatsoever? Those two are bloody ridiculous!_"

"_Eleanor, don't think that just because you don't have a horse under you anymore…_"

People asking about the Hero of Kvatch? That was new. Most people asking went to Kvatch itself, and turned back when they saw how the city had forgotten. Almost everyone had forgotten; even the Imperial City had forgotten about her, even history itself.

Septimus turned abruptly, abandoning his duty briefly. He was a Watch Captain, and he had done his job loyally for a decade; a moment's slip in concentration did not seem to spell utter disaster for the realm, he decided. Locating the source of the voices was more difficult. The Temple District was packed at this time of day as people bustled around, trying to get a good look at the statue of their once-Emperor. His eyes searched the faces of the temple tourists carefully; neither voice had had much trace of an accent to tell him which race he was looking for, though the second had spoken in some kind of mongrel tone between that of Morrowind and that of Valenwood, though it was heavily masked in Cyrodilic.

"_Don't you _dare_ threaten me, half-blood_."

He found the speaker then. A Breton girl by the looks of her, standing next to what looked like an off-colour Wood Elf; she wore a blade and looked like she knew how to use it.

The guardsman approached swiftly. "Hail, citizens," he addressed them, and the pair looked at him in surprise. "I couldn't help but overhear your talking about the Hero of Kvatch…"

"What's it to you?" The Breton shot him a filthy look, but somehow her rage was still directed at her companion who, having seen the guard walking towards them, had lowered his gaze to the ground and failed to lift it.

"I knew her," Septimus replied quickly. He couldn't help but wondering which 'two' the girl had been referring to when he had first heard her speak, and his eyes scanned the crowd instinctively.

The mer spoke, but never looked up. "Were you in the Battle of Bruma then?"

Serocold nodded, and then realised that if he insisted upon studying the ground then there was simply no way he was going to see. "Yes," he affirmed their suspicions. "And the Battle for the Imperial City. I… Why are you searching for her?"

"It's not _us_ searching for her," the Breton growled.

The mer was more accommodating, even though he refused to look the guardsman in the eye. "We're from Kvatch," he explained simply. "It's not really us on this search, and I haven't been in the city long enough to have any real connection, but Eleanor was in the city when the daedra arrived, I think…" That would explain a great deal, at least. Septimus found himself shuddering as he tried to force himself _not_ to think about how old she would have been when her city was sacked. She only looked like she was in her mid-twenties… "Still, the other two are the ones who really want to know about the Hero. They've gone to see the… er…" He gestured to the dragon statue protruding above the Temple dome. "That thing."

"Martin was the priest in Kvatch when I was a child," Eleanor muttered. "We all knew he was touched by the gods, but we had no idea he was descended from Talos. Tell me; is this Temple open at night? I would rather say my prayers in a quiet environment than attempt to tackle that crowd." She glared disdainfully at the people who seemed to be trying to queue up outside of the holy place. "It's virtually sacrilege letting them stay there. You should clear them off. Terribly disrespectful to the gods. They're all sight-seeing!"

Septimus searched the face of the girl before him carefully, looking for her emotions beneath the scowl she seemed to wear as though it had been painted on and could not be removed. When she looked up at the statue with her deep blue eyes, he could read her like a book – pain and sorrow and anger and awe and love and relief. She had survived Kvatch, and an experience like that would have been enough to give a child mental scars for the rest of their life… She probably felt more deeply about the stone dragon than most of the people in this sorry city put together, even if she tried with all her might to mask her feelings. "For all of the people here, Martin is a symbol of our salvation," the Imperial guardsman attempted to explain. "That the gods really _do_ help us in our time of greatest need, even if they wait for the eleventh hour to appear. They flock here when they are in need, or when they feel totally alone and Martin comforts them. This is his legacy."

But the Septim heir had not been the only person who had died for that legacy, even if he was the last. It was only his blood that they needed to banish Dagon to Oblivion; his part in the events preceding was entirely unnecessary, played out of the goodness in his heart. The person who did the most for Tamriel had no legacy, and her body lay in a mass grave rotting, worms crawling through her bones indifferently like they belonged to just anybody rather than the woman who nearly single-handedly brought an end to the Oblivion Crisis. She had not wanted to be remembered, but she had deserved better than _that_. Even history had misplaced her.

"It's still disgusting." She wrinkled her nose at them. "Look at those people. They're like crows to a bloody corpse, scrambling to touch a statue so that they _might_ be rewarded with an hour or two of luckiness. And what are they asking for when they pray? Items for their own gain. Fame, money, love… Some are praying for even cruder things like sex. That man is here because he does not want his wife to find out about his affair, and the one next to him is hiding a skooma addiction." She was perceptive, this Breton, and good at reading things from people's faces and demeanours. Septimus did not want to know what she read from him. She was still talking: "The Nine do not wish to hear about our own individual worries. They care for our realm deeply, but They cannot help individual souls; if They did, then there would have to be thousands of Them. When we pray, we should pray for the world in which we live, for the people we care about most. We should offer apologies for our sins and beg forgiveness, but not for our own gain. Fame and money and sex and skooma… What good will they do when we come to our judgement as we reach Aetherius? And love… Love is a poison that can rot your soul if it is abused. Needs must that we only have love for our gods; humans are not quite so infallible."

_A pious woman_. Eleanor spoke like a priestess who had spent all her life in a temple, praying for the salvation of every race on Nirn. _She has come ten years too late to be our Divine Crusader_. She would have made an excellent Crusader. The previous Crusader had been taken by the Nine, his followers said, as They could not bear to see such a man slain upon a daedric blade. But why such would there be favouritism from the supposedly benevolent and all-loving gods?

"Oh gracious Kynareth, please look after my girls while I am away from them," the mer beside her mumbled into his shirt, still never looking up. The Imperial could not tell if he was saying a serious prayer or simply mocking the Breton's faith.

Whatever he meant by it, the woman still shot him an incredulous glower in return. "Why must you obsess about those damned animals?" she demanded.

He raised his eyes, and instantly Septimus understood why he had chosen to keep his gaze trained on the chalky white stones underfoot. Two red irises peeped beneath golden eyelashes, a strangely sinister sight upon the face of a Wood Elf. The guardsman did not react, however. The mer appeared unarmed and anything but dangerous, and he was standing in the sunlight like nothing was wrong, leading the Imperial to suspect that the scarlet eyes he possessed were nothing more than poor fortune. "All the years I was living outside of Kvatch alone, my girls were the only company I had. They are not judgemental of me because of my skin or my eyes. They know me, and they accept me, and they mean more to me than any person in the entirety of Tamriel. You may think that they are nothing more than dumb animals, but they are my kin, my closest friends, the beings in which I can confide my darkest secrets, and they won't let me down. I am sorry if a lifetime of being ostracised by society leads me to readjust the order of my priorities."

With eyes that made him look somewhat akin to a member of the undead, Serocold wasn't surprised to hear that this mer had been ejected from the society he lived in. People were fickle creatures, and in some situations he wouldn't have made it past infancy without being 'sacrificed to appease the gods'. He didn't seem like a bad person, just long-suffering.

The mer observed Septimus suspiciously. "Isn't your hand even going to reach for your weapon?" he asked coldly. "Red eyes. Vampire, right? That's what all you stupid guards think…"

"You're not a vampire," the Imperial replied smoothly. "If you were, you wouldn't be out in sunlight, and I doubt you would be making conversation. Besides, the eyes don't make the vampire, do they? Dark Elves have red eyes, and Orcs have extended canines that almost look like fangs, and some perfectly normal people burn when they walk in the sun. It is not the physical appearance that makes someone a vampire, but the blackness in their heart that thirsts for the blood of innocents. You are not a vampire. Simply different."

"_That's exactly what I have been saying to you all along!_" a voice behind him chorused before a girl in a green robe bounced into view. "Otherwise I would be a ghost." She chuckled, and a shaft of light revealed her pale white face from beneath the shadow of her heavy hood. "Who's this, Feu?" The Watch Captain noted that the Breton cringed.

"Some guard who claims he fought in the Battle for the Imperial City," she shrugged.

The newcomer gasped. "Oooh!" she exclaimed. "Do you know what happened to the Hero of Kvatch?" She bounded away, and when she returned she was towing a youthful looking Redguard boy with a sword on his hip. "Aden spoke to her once, didn't you Aden?" He nodded silently.

Septimus frowned deeply. "She died," he admitted, watching the expressions of the four. To their credit, while saddened, they did not appear surprised. "She was a good woman. Abrasive personality, yes, but she didn't deserve to die so young. She never wanted any part in this, but she still gave up her life…"

"Where is she buried?" the girl enquired solemnly.

The guardsman could only shrug his reply. "They placed all the bodies in a communal grave outside the city walls. When that filled up, they burnt the rest of the corpses." The smell of singed flesh had hung in the air for weeks, reminding everyone what a travesty the whole business was.

"History has written her out…"

"In truth, that was what she wanted, though she deserved to have volumes and volumes written about her. But she kept a low profile during her time in Cyrodiil, interacting with very few and telling almost nobody her name …"

"She told me her name," the Redguard said quietly. "Why would she do that?"

"You are one of the lucky few then. I'm afraid I know little of her story. At the end of the day, I only knew her name because of her friend. I saw her, travelled with her, and knew her by sight and sound – though just before her death the sounds she made were limited – but I couldn't call her by name. I know now that her name was Idari Mortha, but books are not written by Watch Captains with limited subject knowledge."

The white-skinned girl – Serocold was pretty sure she was a Nord, but still wavering on the point of uncertainty – frowned deeply. "Her friend?"

"Don't you _dare_ get any stupid ideas, Finny," Eleanor snapped, as if she had recognised the tone of voice as something far more sinister than it appeared. "Our quest is over now. There is nobody to find. We should just… go back to Kvatch."

The red-eyed Bosmer grinned. "And waste a journey?" he asked. Turning to Septimus, he said: "Did her friend survive the Battle for the Imperial City?"

Serocold couldn't help but smirk. They were sounding an awful lot like they were planning to do something he had been wishing to do for the last decade. "He survived, yes, but he was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang a few days afterwards." He paused, watching their reactions. "On the morning of his execution, his cell was found empty, and no search party ever brought back trace of him. If he is still alive – and given his string of luck during the Oblivion Crisis I will assume that he is – he is beyond the borders of Cyrodiil. Precisely where I cannot say, but he was a good man, an honest man… I doubt he has gone far."

"How do we find _one_ person in the _whole_ of Tamriel?" complained the fiery-haired girl. She seemed to be the pragmatist of the little quartet, but Septimus didn't feel that she was endearing herself to him.

"There I can't help you," the guardsman shrugged. He had been pondering the same question for many years.

A pregnant pause ensued.

"The Blades." The speaker was the Redguard boy, though he spoke so quietly that Septimus couldn't be sure if he had actually heard something. "Eleanor, your aunt was a Blade… The Blades were Uriel Septim's spymasters for a time, weren't they? The eyes and ears of Tamriel…"

"My aunt died along with the Emperor in the tunnels beneath the city walls eleven years ago. And the Blades probably won't exist anymore… It has been ten years since we had an Emperor!"

Septimus shook his head. "They had a new Grandmaster appointed after the Battle of Bruma. I know for a fact that he survived the Battle for the Imperial City as well. The Blades were always a mostly silent organisation, and while they are likely severely depleted in numbers, the work that they do will still be being carried out by those few that remain. Their stronghold is Cloud Ruler Temple, north of Bruma, though the other best place to look would be Weynon Priory, near Chorrol." It struck the guardsman that he had been putting off returning to his duty for quite some time now, and that if he wasn't a Watch Captain then he would probably be in for a stern reprimand. Luckily his rank would protect him from a large amount of that punishment, especially when twinned with the fact that he was one of the most experienced fighters in the city despite having only seen two battles. He had barely been injured in either, and for that the men of the Watch looked up to him. "If you'll excuse me, I should be getting back to my rounds…"

"Captain, where did you serve before here?" asked the Redguard as he turned to walk away.

The question gave the Imperial a considerable amount of pause. Nobody had asked him that for such a long time. "Cheydinhal…" he mumbled, confused, wondering why they would care about such a fact. "I was a Sergeant back then, though."

"Did you know the two soldiers from Kvatch who fought in the Battle of Bruma?"

He had to shake his head again. "I saw them, but they were in the reserve battalion. Hardly anybody from that unit survived. A gate opened right on top of them and they were overwhelmed. I tried to help, but most of the damage was done by the time I got there… Why?"

"My aunt speaks highly of Jesan and Ilend, that's all. She's a guard in Kvatch… Well, she _was_. She doesn't do many shifts these days, but she trained me with a blade. Everything I know I learnt from my aunt. The city never really learnt what became of their guardsmen, save that they died; the message we got was sketchy at best. They'd love to know the finer details, I know. Most of the survivors of Kvatch still live there, while the survivors of the other battles all seem to have fled… Our battle brought us together, while yours scattered you to the four winds. Why did you move?"

Septimus glared at the stone floor. "I thought I would be doing some good, helping them rebuild. But once the city was rebuilt… Thousands of people slaughtered, and they're still in the midst of their petty feud as if nothing had happened. People are still stealing, raping, and murdering same as before. You would have thought that Martin dying for our sakes was enough to make us change our wicked ways… But apparently not. Now I have a duty and there is no choice in the matter. I shall stay here until I am no longer fit to carry it out, even if I am to be the only shred of honour left in this filthy sin-ridden city." He spun on his heels and strode away.

"_Captain_," a voice said behind him. It was the white girl in the green robe, practically running to catch up with his long stride despite the fact that she was of height with him. "Your name, Captain?" she asked when he failed to slow, barely keeping pace. "We will make sure the Hero of Kvatch is remembered, and we will want to know who to ask for, who to thank, when we have the knowledge to rewrite our flawed history."

"Septimus Serocold," he replied, pushing open the heavy doors into the Palace District, where the White Gold Tower poked into the sky, virtually unmarred by the war of ten years past. "Though I do not need your thanks."

"But Captain, that's what the Hero of Kvatch said."

Septimus stopped walking so abruptly that the girl crashed into him and would have ended up on the floor had he not stuck his arm out to catch her. "I am nothing more than a guardsman. It would be highly improper of me to take any glory for what happened here ten years ago." He looked up at the palace, and then down at the gate to the Temple District that he had just come through; he had seen a good man die there, sacrificing himself completely to help their cause. The thought sent a shiver careering down his spine. "Thousands and thousands of good men fought, and thousands and thousands of good men died. One survivor is hardly worth his salt."

The girl looked at him with pale blue eyes, squinting slightly in the light. By the looks of it, she was the only one of the four who had followed, though the other three could be just about anywhere. "Captain Serocold," she said. "If I could then I would write out the story of every single survivor of the Oblivion Crisis, from Kvatch to Bruma to the Imperial City. I would write out every single escapade of the Hero of Kvatch and this friend of hers that you mentioned we should look for. I would write the tales of all the men who died too, their entire life stories, be they short or long… But I can't, Captain Serocold." She looked crestfallen. "The only person I have before me now is you, and your feat is a feat worth mentioning as much as anybody else's. Perhaps I will even write my own story. A journal of our trip across Tamriel to find answers about what _really_ happened during the Oblivion Crisis. You may be only a guardsman, Captain Serocold, but you are one of Tamriel's great heroes nonetheless. I cannot abide that you would let yourself be forgotten like the Hero of Kvatch did. I met a man in Skingrad who received a wound during the Battle of Bruma that completely rocked his life and turned it upside down; he is now alone, suffering in his madness but proud of the part he played. Men like you and men like him need to be remembered by the fickle people in this province. I will see to it."

Septimus looked at her carefully, searching her for something that might give away a more sinister intention that she had, but he saw nothing. She was being genuine. "How old are you, girl?" he asked her.

"Eight-and-ten."

Eighteen. The only person who cared enough to write the stories of Tamriel's heroes was still half a child. It seemed typical. "You were eight when the Oblivion Crisis ended…"

"Yes," she replied, a sour tone creeping into her voice. "But I was in Skyrim at that time, with my father. I didn't know much about what was going on, and I never saw a single daedra. A couple of years later, my father took me to Kvatch and left me there, and I saw what damage had been done to this poor province first hand. I never realised what I could do to help until Aden showed me a statue he had built of the Hero of Kvatch when he was a child. Now, though… Now I have to rewrite history."

"A bold undertaking," the Imperial murmured half to himself. "Very well," he continued in a louder voice. "If you wish to tell my story then you may, but only once you have found Turner and told of the Hero of Kvatch. Another condition is that you also tell the tales of the two battlemages who survived -Murz gra-Yazgash and Mebestian Guerrier - who both still live in the Arcane University. Murz's elder sister died in the Battle of Bruma, but not from wounds she sustained in the battle, rather from an ancient curse laid upon her by the lich Mannimarco as she did her duty for her guild. You will tell of the High Elf who gave up his life on that spot over there." He pointed to the place he was speaking of and a knot twisted in his stomach to remember it. "Who selflessly died to allow us access to the Temple District. He had been Arch-Mage briefly before he was killed, and it was he who finally bested the King of Worms. His history, along with Murz's sister, should be documented by the mages. And above all else, you will write of Idari Mortha, but also of Turner, her friend, who faced the battles when he had little or no combat skills, and who ran into an Oblivion gate at Skingrad simply because there was nobody else around despite not knowing what lay ahead. He was a good man, and if ever Tamriel had two heroes, it was those two together."

The girl smiled warmly. "I will do it!" she promised. "On my honour."

Septimus found his lips curling upwards. She reminded him of someone he had known long ago, a man intent upon telling the world the truth about what had really happened in Tamriel, but who had had to fight knocked out of him when he lost every single person he held dear. Sincerely, the Watch Captain prayed that she would not end up the same way. Her heart was in the right place, and with any luck she would fare better than Turner had done. "Good lass," he said. "Go to Weynon Priory first," he suggested. It was the least he could do to try and help her on her most noble of quests. "I cannot guarantee that you will get much help from the monks there, but if anyone will be able to help you then it is the Blades. If you should see Grandmaster Steffan, tell him you are looking for Turner, and tell him that I sent you. Nobody should really know the Argonian's name beyond those of us who were there at the time, and most people were led to believe that he was caught and executed. He wasn't. If that doesn't work, tell him it's for Idari Mortha. _Nobody_ in the province knows her name unless they witnessed the aftermath of the Avatar of Akatosh."

She nodded vigorously. "Thank you, Captain Serocold." Then she smirked. "But you're wrong about people who were not a part of the battle here not knowing the Hero of Kvatch's name." She paused as her smirk grew into a grin. "For every single day of the last ten years, there was a boy in Kvatch who knew."


	6. Taelandra

_Chapter 6_

Taelandra looked into the faces of the men before her and frowned, her thin lips pressed together tightly and her small eyes fierce. "Never," she told them firmly, smoothing her robe over her legs.

Their leader, a brutish man even for a mercenary, took on an entirely new threatening appearance as his jaw set. "Our Commander is not without mercy. Leave this place before midday and you may be spared your lives. Fail to do so and you will die."

"I'm afraid it is you who will be dying," Taelandra chuckled, standing from her heavy oak chair. She towered above almost all of the men at her full height. "You would do well not to underestimate us. See that you tell your _Commander_ that."

A man with a black pit where his left eye ought to have been and who was missing most of an ear sneered. "A group of old folk against a whole army and you expect to win?"

"As I said, you would do well not to underestimate us." She allowed her comment to sink in a little before saying, "You can show yourselves out, gentlemen," and breezing past them, down the wooden stairs and out into the daylight.

The morning was crisp and fresh, with a thin film of dew clinging to the leaves of all the plants and the birds overhead chirping. What blighted the picture were the tents lined up in their hundreds just beyond the boundaries of her home, filthy and ragged, and the men who dwelt there had made it their business to befoul the area as much as possible, filling the once clean air with the stench of burning meat and excrement. Taelandra wrinkled her nose and fought with the overwhelming urge to vomit, quickly crossing the courtyard and entering the small chapel before she was noticed and had a torrent of abuse hurled at her.

Within, the two dozen men were hardly what she was used to working with. These were men past their primes, who complained about their joints and were losing their eyesight, but at least she could argue for their experience. She was older than every one of them and still barely more than middle-aged, but she had come to accept long ago that men lived lives on this plane for little more than a fraction of a heartbeat while the mer endured for ages.

"They attack at midday," she announced, positioning herself at the lectern. "Now, this is not the most defensible of positions, but it _must_ not fall, for if it does then we place the entire county in jeopardy, and subsequently the entire province of Cyrodiil. Brothers, can I count on you to aid me?"

The response what not what Taelandra had been hoping for. A few moments of silence followed her speech as the men looked between each other hopefully, wishing that somebody would speak up, as though they had been planning this for some time. The woman's stomach twisted into a knot when she realised that it seemed as though she would be fighting alone to save this poor old building from being overrun by the scum outside in their squalid campsite.

"Brothers, I cannot protect this place alone. Without your help it shall fall into the hands of those horrid mercenaries and our order shall fall once more. Tell me that your years here have not turned you soft and that you still believe Cyrodiil is a cause worth fighting for! One day soon a new Emperor will be installed and we Blades shall have work to do as we did so very long ago. Tell me you can still remember the days under Uriel Septim? You are old men, but you are not so old that you cannot recall that time!"

"Hush, Sister," whispered a man who compared to the others was positively ancient. The lines on his face were deep and pronounced, and his entire visage was wind-burnt as though he had spent many a year at sea. "We are old men. It has been a decade since some of us last took up a sword, as long as there has been no Emperor upon the throne. We would hinder you far more than we could ever help you. We are soldiers no longer."

"You expect me to fight alone?"

"No, Sister," the man said calmly, the inflection in his voice utterly minimal. "Give up and return to Cloud Ruler Temple."

"I will _not_ let Weynon Priory fall. If you will not help then I shall defend it alone." Taelandra stepped down from the lectern and scanned the group before her with pale green eyes. "You have until midday to flee, and there are horses in the stable, unless those ruffians decided they fancied a late night snack of charred horse meat. Should any of you actually hold any value to our order, I shall be at my desk." She left abruptly.

In all honesty the woman was as scared as the rest of them. At this moment in time it looked as though she would be facing around one hundred men paid for their loyalty single-handedly. Mercenaries wouldn't be too difficult to discourage from fighting if they believe she actually had a decently sized force of her own, or even a force at all, but at present she was backed by a group of terrified old men who had been warriors in a past life they all seemed to have shunned from their memories and would abandon her in order to save their skins. Now the mercenaries would be killing her and any men who stayed for blood sport, and any one she killed would be replaced by ten more until Weynon Priory fell.

The prospects looked hopeless.

Taelandra rubbed her temples in an attempt to dispel the headache that was building there, sending a stab of pain through her brain with every beat of her heart. She glared over at the tents of her enemies and envisaged setting the entire camp on fire with a spell she had learnt before she even reached adolescence, but she forced the image from her mind as quickly as it formed. Such things would solve nothing.

She had never been a part of a fight with more than three opponents before. While she had been a member of the Blades during the Oblivion Crisis, she had been on an important mission to the Summerset Isles that had prevented her return. In many ways that was probably her biggest regret, but she could reconcile herself to the fact that at least she had returned and offered her sword to Grandmaster Steffan at the first opportunity. The new Grandmaster had an entirely different leadership style to Jauffre before him, but Taelandra could not think of a single person among the order who was fit to take his place, even though age was beginning to wear on him.

Pacing about in the courtyard getting her nowhere, she slipped into the priory building and shut the door behind her, considering leaving it bolted for a second before deciding against it. As she had suspected, the lowlife band from earlier had seen fit to relieve the building of a few paltry items of silverware that she was beyond caring about; they could be replaced, unlike this order if Weynon Priory were to fall into the hands of their greedy general, a man styling himself as the next Emperor. He was a Colovian warlord that seemed to think he needed a county from which to front his operations… Apparently Chorrol had been just the city he was looking for, with its aging and sickly Countess, tall and defensible walls and nearly central proximity. Taelandra wished she could do more to help the city's defence, but they had holed themselves up inside their walls and refused to open them even for supplies. Apparently the mages were doing their best to replenish food stocks.

It was said that as soon as Countess Valga was at death's door with some illness that no healer could cure, and since she was only countess in the wake of her husband's death and her daughter was married to the Count of Leyawiin there was nobody to take over from her. As soon as she died, Taelandra imagined her people would lose heart and open their gates. She was loved by her people, and had been an excellent leader in her prime. Time, however, had swiftly turned against her.

Chorrol was a pleasant city. It was a shame to see it so close to falling.

Taelandra scaled the stairs two at a time – her long legs made it possible for her to do so without any kind of effort on her part – and walked into her 'office'. It wasn't much of an office, truth to be told, but it was the closest she could get to an office; it had a bedroom adjoined to it in which she slept that had once been behind a hidden wall that had since been ripped out, leaving an ugly scar in the plaster and a gaping hole in its wake. The men slept on the opposite landing on makeshift bedrolls that made them complain about their aching joints whenever they lay down to rest. Any actual beds had been burnt during a particularly harsh winter that had claimed six brothers even with the additional warmth.

She marched to her desk and lowered herself once more into the high backed chair that was there. These were not the same items of furniture that had been here when Grandmaster Jauffre had lived within these walls, she knew – those had gone one winter as well – but she still felt closer to the man than ever when she sat in this place. Taelandra sighed, tracing a finger over the markings in the wood, praying for answers, for strength, for a miracle.

Retrieving her katana from her bedroom, she returned to her desk and began to hone it with a whetstone slowly. She had done the same thing many times over the years, and the repetitive action at least made a start towards calming her frayed nerves and the knot in her stomach. For a moment she thought about sending a bird out for help, but she knew it would be pointless and more than likely the mercenaries would make sport of shooting the poor creature down before it got her message out.

The nickering of horses outside alerted her to the fact that the old men were running. She hoped that the warlord's men would keep their word and let them escape, because for them to die while running away would be the ultimate disgrace upon their memories. Taelandra had always known that relying on them would be a long shot, but she had hoped that maybe at least one of them would have enough of a shred of honour or duty or justice left to aid her at this perilous time. She wished that the door would open and one man would walk through it, the answer to her problems and her saviour.

She laid her whetstone upon her desk and stood, carrying the sharpened blade with her. It had been years since she had last seen combat and months since she had had a worthy partner to spar with and she suspected her skills had grown rusty. Another factor contributing to her impending death.

Even after all this time, her sword still felt like an extension of her arm. It had been made for her more years ago than she cared to remember, with a long, narrow blade and hand-and-a-half hilt; at first glance it appeared just like any other Akaviri katana, but this one she had enchanted herself with a deadly spell that sucked on the life of whomever it cut. A small nick would leave the victim severely weakened, and anything more serious would be fatal. For that reason, she only used it in real combat, sparring instead with its mundane twin or a dull iron longsword.

Exhaling, she took up a stance with her sword before moving slowly into the next position and then the next and the next, faster and faster until her movements became a blur. It was all pointless though; having an enemy against her would make more difference than she cared to think about. Enemies were unpredictable, unskilled, without mercy, unsporting, and above all afraid to die. And an enemy that was afraid of death was twice as formidable as any other.

She didn't stop until she was panting and covered in a thin film of sweat. She slipped her katana back into its scabbard and walked to the large window, looking at the sun carefully. There was maybe an hour left, and almost every single horse was gone from the stable save for the dappled paint mare that belonged to Taelandra herself.

"Did they leave her so that I could run?" the woman mused aloud, her fingers opening and closing on the hilt of her sword. "I shall not run." She returned to her room and opened the chest that contained her old armour, contemplating. She slipped on a light chainmail hauberk over a soft leather shirt, but she didn't dare with anything heavier in case it disrupted her ability to move; she would need to be faster than every one of her attackers if she wanted to make it out alive, as unlikely as that was. The only other protection she chose was a pair of worn leather bracers that she slipped over her wrists lovingly like old friends.

An hour… She sat at her desk and retrieved her quill and a roll of parchment. Dipping the feather into her inkwell, she wrote a message to whoever may find it in future, about this place Weynon Priory and her predicament and her imminent death at the hands of a Colovian warlord for refusing to give up this place. She wrote of the Blades and their mission, and of what she had been doing in the decade since Martin Septim died. When it was done, she dripped plain white wax onto it and let it dry without pressing any kind of seal into it before imbuing the parchment with a spell to protect it should this building be demolished beneath it. Then she hid it.

Outside a drum began to beat rhythmically, calling the mercenaries to take up their arms in readiness for the excessively one-sided battle. Taelandra hoped that the odds would make them cocky and therefore sloppy, but sellswords were notoriously careful with their own lives. She descended the stairs quickly, katana on her hip and threw open the door before slamming it shut behind her, sealing it with a spell so that they could not simply distract her and take the place.

The brutish thug from earlier was there with the man who had no left eye who hung back a little. "We gave you until midday," the first one said.

"And the elderly priests have fled," Taelandra replied coldly, sizing the pair up while horribly aware of the mass behind them. She pursed her lips as she looked at them, scowling. "Before you stands the last defender of Weynon Priory. I warn you; I will not go down easily."

The one eyed man laughed. "One old woman? There are hundreds of us."

"As stated, I am the last defender. I may be of greater age than people such as yourselves could even dream of accomplishing, but I am far from old. You forget that mer such as myself age differently to you weak and pathetic humans," she sneered, drawing her katana from its scabbard. "Do you believe it is fair for hundreds of men to attack one 'old' woman? Surely we should make this a bit fairer and a bit more… entertaining." She was bluffing, trying to buy herself time. If she died, her spell on the Priory doors would die with her and they would be free to ransack the building. To look at them, none of them seemed like the type who would be studied in the art of magic, and this was something she intended to use to her advantage. "I put a challenge to any man who believes they have the skills to defeat me."

There was a pause before a Redguard stepped forward, hefting an axe. He was tall and muscular, and his bare chest was covered in small, deep scars as though he had been punched through by a thousand arrows. Taelandra had known a man like him, once, but he had died long ago; the sort of man you had to defeat using brains rather than brawn. His weapon had a huge blade but it seemed mundane so she didn't need to worry about potential enchantments making her life more difficult. If anything, he was probably an old Arena fighter, by the look of him, who had defected after the Oblivion Crisis was over. While the Arena fighters had saved their district from the daedra during the Battle for the Imperial City, very few of them had remained combatants afterwards.

For his size, he was quicker than she had expected him to be when he charged at her, and the power behind that axe would have split her in two if she had not stepped to one side and allowed him to barrel past her. While he was fast, she was faster, and she danced in as she turned, slashing his upper arm with precision. Her enchanted blade did the rest, sucking from his life force hungrily until he dropped his weapon and fell to his knees. Taelandra decapitated him in a smooth swing of her sword.

"The bitch's sword is enchanted!" one of the mercenaries shouted, voicing the thoughts of every man there. Clearly none of them had paid enough attention to see the slight shimmer in the blade when she drew it, or feel the rippling power from it when it swung.

Now they were worried.

"I shall make this fair to you," she said, trying to sound more confident than she felt. "Your two best men against me. When one man falls you may send another, and so it goes on. I shall tire after a while and then I shall make mistakes, so you have no reason to fear."

The brutish thug turned to his one-eyed companion, and she heard one of them growl: "But the bitch's sword is enchanted. We'd lose so many men!", to which the other replied: "Stop being such a pussy. She's an old woman. If people can't take her down then they don't deserve to live."

"Take her yourself then," the man with one eye grumbled. "Any more of you stupid tossers got a death wish?" he yelled into the crowd. Nobody stepped forward.

Taelandra spoke up: "Well, in that case it seems as though you shall have to accept defeat and leave this place." It was dangerous to mock them, she knew, but she could tell that they would not leave until she demoralised them enough that they fled for their lives. "May you forever live with the shame that you were beaten by an old woman with a magic sword."

An arrow whizzed past her face, tearing her cheek open as it sped into the wall of the building behind her. Archers; why had she not thought of that? The bowman stepped out of the crowd, another arrow nocked on his string as her fingers found the sticky trail of blood spilling from the cut. _Don't heal it. Not yet._

"Next time I won't miss," he promised, grinding his teeth together.

"I would not be so sure," the woman replied. She had met several overconfident archers in her time. The type of people who believed that they could easily distance themselves from the fight and were therefore invulnerable to harm. She had watched more than a few die in close combat they were utterly unprepared for. Her cheek dripped blood onto her shoulder and down the front of her armour, one slow drop at a time; she knew she could heal it in a heartbeat, but her strategy lay in the fact that they did not believe she could perform magic. A mercenary was a whole different kettle of slaughterfish to a spellsword; one she knew she could deal with.

The archer grinned, a terrifying mash of rotting teeth lining his gums. He drew his bow with deliberate slowness, taking careful aim at the centre of Taelandra's chest. The woman exhaled but was still; _let them believe that they have won_. In the crowd, other men leered crude offers at her that she blocked out, her eyes locked on the tip of the projectile.

_Three… Two…_ The twang of a bowstring filled her ears as she counted slowly through her mind. He was too close for her to have long to react, and so she said the words quickly, the ones she had been practicing for years and years. The arrow turned to ash before it hit her, spraying her with fine black powder but doing no damage.

"Fuck!" swore the man with one eye as though it had never crossed his mind that an old woman could do magic. "Kill the bitch!" he yelled at his cohorts, though they all looked a lot less assured of their victory than they had a moment ago. "I don't care how you do it, just fucking kill her!"

The more confident mercenaries swooped in like vultures, so many of them that Taelandra knew she was going to have a terrible fight. But the fact of the matter was that now they were scared of her. She knew she could take them on if they were scared of her; they wouldn't go near her blade and they would likely hang back a little to avoid being vaporised. Shooting a wave of healing magic up to her cheek, she felt the skin knit itself back together, stinging a little in the process. Restoration had never been her strong point.

Taelandra faced the first man, a thickset Imperial whose arms were almost as wide as her head and who towered above the rest by almost a foot. He was ugly with a square face, a broken nose and an offset jaw as though it had been broken and not healed, and the sword he carried was almost as tall as the woman he intended to kill with it. Fear spiked in the back of her mind as he lumbered towards her and she dodged his overhead cleave, spinning away to find herself face to face with two of the smaller brutes, one of which had lost his right arm below the elbow. She needed to funnel them into a position in which she would only have to deal with one at a time, she knew, but she didn't have the time to think or even the resources to create such a situation.

Her blade flicked up and was met by that of the one-armed man as the second swung a hammer at her skull, aiming to shatter it. She twitched as her muscles tensed and disentangled her sword from the other, whipping it into the stomach of the second man – who tried to block it with her arm to no avail – and slashing him, turning and sticking the one-armed man between two ribs. Both men fell with a thud.

The woman rotated on the spot as she yanked her katana from the body, blood glistening along its length. She leapt to one side of a thrust towards her midriff, gashing the wielder of the blade and allowing the enchantment on her own to do its work, the world around her becoming a blur as they closed in from all sides now.

She heard a curse as they tried to break down the priory door but were thwarted by her spell. Luckily she had dealt with enough of their kind before that she could predict how they would act, and the thought made her lips twitch upwards into a half-smile as she gouged a line into the small of another man's back.

They were on her so tightly that with a well placed slash she could kill two of them, and they trampled over the dead and dying as though they didn't care for their fallen comrades. The biggest man was hanging back, probably waiting for an opportunity to take her alone, and she heard the overconfident archer shouting obscenities at his colleagues because he could not get a clear shot.

Their armour was practically made of paper against the sharpness of her blade, and she sliced through it like butter, piercing one man through the groin as she stabbed downwards through his shield and turned another man to dust. She did not like having to disintegrate people, and the use of magicka she had not tapped into for some time was beginning to take its toll, weakening her. Screams of pain rose into the sky as she fought her growing fatigue, until finally one of the men grabbed her from behind, holding her still even though she struggled and flicking her blade from her grasp.

_This is it then_. She slammed her foot into his armoured boot, but it did not lessen his grip. "Gut the bitch," he growled. On the floor she could see almost two dozen corpses and she knew that she had caused carnage among them, a saving grace to the end she was going to have.

"Don't be stupid." The one-eyed man appeared to have made himself their leader now, though Taelandra could not remember killing the brute who had commanded them before; that said, she could not remember killing most of the men who lay dead and dying. "We've caught her now." His grin was the most terrifying thing she had ever witnessed. "I say we have some fun with her."

_Fun_. She knew what he meant the instant he started speaking and the thought made her stomach roil in disgust. If only she had not used so much magicka she might have had a chance of escaping, but it was not to be, and the man holding her was too strong, though she struggled against his grip with renewed vigour. "I wouldn't give you the satisfaction," she growled, slamming her elbow into the ribcage of the man holding her. He winced with pain but only grabbed her harder and jerked her body around until she felt nauseous.

"Hold still and it will hurt less," he snarled in her ear. His breath smelt putrid, like rotting meat, and his beard scratched her face.

Taelandra closed her eyes and concentrated on amassing some small semblance of magicka with which to smite the man who held her. She knew she could burn him or freeze him in order to force him to let go, but if she did that then there was a chance it would injure her as well and even then the other men around them would make short work of her. One of the thugs picked up her blade and began looking it up and down; it was stained with crimson now and she hoped he would make the mistake of running a thumb along it to checks its edge. He never did.

Of course, there was always the option of using the pathetic amount of magicka she had left in order to end her own life. Not so much death before capture as death before brutal torture and, she predicted, rape. Though the biggest flaw she could see in that plan was that upon her death the spell holding the doors of Weynon Priory closed would be broken and they would have free access, making her apparent suicide being for no particular reason other than that she could not take a bit of pain. Was not giving one's life for one's cause more honourable than allowing oneself to endure inhuman torture in it's defence? No. Taelandra supposed that she was wrong on that count.

_Talos give me the strength to stand firm in the face of peril. Julianos grant me the wisdom to escape from the bonds of my captors. Stendarr project thy mercy upon these men so that they might allow me to survive. Arkay help me to evade death. Akatosh allow my years to be long and plentiful. Mother Mara grant these men compassion and understanding. Kynareth cast down thy sky spirits to smite them where they stand…_

Her prayer would have continued, but she felt a whoosh beside her and heard a gurgling as the man holding her let go to claw at his throat. When the Blade opened her eyes, she saw an arrow in his neck almost to the fletching, blood trickling from the wound and rising into his mouth, making him choke.

The men around her paused in shock at what had happened, confused as to who had fired the arrow. One of their own? An outsider? They didn't know, or they couldn't tell.

Taelandra blasted the man holding her sword with magicka and bits of his flesh flew in all directions as though they had been mashed into a pulp, splattering everybody with blood and gore. She seized the slimy weapon and slit the throat of the one-eyed man amid the bewilderment before whipping her blade around to face any men who decided to take her on. She should have run. By the Nine, she knew that she should have run, but she was perplexed as well as to who had saved her and her curiosity gave her pause, long enough for the one-eyed man to rasp at his followers before he died and attract their attention back to her.

Inwardly, the woman swore a string of curse words that she had never considered saying before as they turned, blood in their eyes as they saw their fallen leader draw his final breath at their feet, red oozing from the wound to his neck. She would never outrun these men on foot, and she knew that they would kill her before she reached the horse that her comrades had so kindly left for her to flee upon.

That was what she _should_ have done. Cast the locking spell upon the door and fled, so that it would only be dissolved if they hunted her down to kill her, and by then she would be long gone to wherever she felt like being. With a large enough head-start, she would have found it fairly simple to evade them until they stopped looking or until she succumbed to old age; whichever came first.

With her magic drained, she wouldn't last against more than two of them at a time, and now three dozen were advancing on her with murder written on their faces. An almost inaudible twang reached her ears and a man stumbled as an arrow erupted from his chest, the grey feathers of its fletching all that were visible as it punched a perfect hole through his leather vest. The men around him roared in anger, and Taelandra herself wondered who was helping her, and whether or not they could take out all the men before they reached her. She doubted it, since they were moving quicker now and the gap was narrowing, even though she paced backwards through the arch beneath the priory in the direction of the stables.

One was taken in the back of the neck and fell face forward into the mud, already dead. Apparently it had severed his brain stem.

_Stay calm_, Taelandra told herself. _You have allies now_. But apparently her allies were on the other side of the priory, hidden in the trees, and she was leading the barbaric pack away from them. Also she had no idea what lay behind her, so any number of the thugs could be waiting. Why didn't they run at her? And why didn't their archer just take her down? She had no idea. Maybe they were afraid of her…

Two more men died in quick succession, one man from a shot to the temple and the other with an arrow in his back. It was clearly a combination of an expert marksman and a powerful bow in order for the projectiles to sink so deep. She didn't know anybody who fletched their arrows grey; over the years she had met people with green or blue or white or black, but never grey, not once. The grey arrows perplexed her greatly, because it seemed as though she did not know her saviour, which led her to wonder why anybody would bother saving her at all.

Taelandra continued walking backwards down the path, paranoia spiking in the back of her mind as she passed the stables and the cottage that had ten years ago belonged to a shepherd and now belonged to nobody. Anybody could flank her and kill her and then the Priory would fall and she would have failed. In the corner of her eye she saw a figure slip underneath the archway quickly, clearly unseen by the people who had remained in the camp belonging to the various ruffians who had deemed to chase her. Three more men were felled by arrows flying from the figure's new location.

One person? Interesting. Asides the moment she had spied their shape moving through the arch, she had not seen them at all, so they were clearly as adept at stealth as they were at marksmanship. Not magic though; if it were magic, all of the enemy would be dead or they wouldn't have been seen in the first place. She wondered who they were and why they were killing the rogues bent upon murdering her just to take over the place she had come to think of as her home.

The woman searched within herself once more. She had a little magicka that had returned, but not enough for a spell of disintegration. Slowly she nodded to herself; she knew which spell to cast. Taelandra inhaled once and then held her breath in anticipation, waiting for the moment at which to cast her enchantment; it was not one of her strongest magic areas and she knew that she could not hold the illusion for very long after she cast it, but it would be long enough for her to escape.

As if on cue, the mystery archer fired and a man went down. Quickly the woman muttered her Ayleid words and felt herself fade from existence, a telltale sign that her Chameleon spell was, at the very least, functioning. The men swore vehemently at her disappearance and ran to the spot where she had last been while she backtracked down the path back to where she had come from, skirting around the outside of the stables and slipping into the trees behind.

The bowman – or, apparently, bow-woman – was crouched behind a rock, an arrow nocked. Her line of sight was through the stables towards the gaggle of confused men, where she continued to pick them off expertly, one at a time. She was a scrawny thing, a Redguard who did not share her race's characteristic tall height; she looked young but the way she wielded her bow spoke of years of experience, and the weapon itself looked like it was of daedric origin, which explained why it was penetrating the armour of the men so easily. The girl herself was dressed in a moss green tunic belted at the waist over leather trousers; her sleeves were rolled up to the elbow and she had strips of black cloth wrapped around her wrists, presumably to stop them from being injured by her bowstring as it snapped taut each time she fired.

"My name is Daaniel," she whispered between shots. "But most people call me Eagle."

Taelandra was surprised. "You can see me?"

The Redguard did not look up, but instead fired another arrow and gained another kill. "I make it my business to see things that others cannot," she replied. Remaining in her slight crouch, she gestured for the Blade to move closer. "We must leave this position. They have realised where my arrows are flying from. Go through the forest in that direction until you reach the path near the Odiil farm; Rallus will be there waiting and you must tell him that Eagle sent you."

"What of you?"

She shook her head. "I can shoot a man dead at five hundred yards. They will not get near me."

"Thank you for saving me," Taelandra offered, though Daaniel did not appear to want to talk.

For a moment, the Redguard woman turned back and met her gaze with burning green eyes. "Thank you for being the only Blade willing to defend your order anymore."

"How do you know about the-"

"Leave. Now." Eagle turned and fired another two shots before sprinting into the forest in the opposite direction to that in which she had pointed the older woman. The men saw her as she ran, but she was lithe as a cat and seemed to float with every stride that propelled her forwards at a pace that would have made Taelandra jealous when she was at the peak of her fitness.

The Blade ducked behind the rock and waited for the men to pass before following the woman's instructions through the forest until she met the road. An Imperial man was waiting for her, his head almost bald and portraying a large, relatively fresh scar from just below his right eye down to his right shoulder. He was wrapped in a travelling cloak, but a greatsword hung from his back, tarnished and well-used.

"Eagle sent me," the Blade said as loudly as she dared. The man reacted instantly, snapping his attention onto her.

"You are the woman who was holding off the ruffians from Weynon Priory then?" he asked, his hand shifting his cloak slightly to reveal another sword strapped to his hip. "I commend you. Times are hard with the warlord attempting to take over the county and few people are left who are willing to fight. Eagle went north, I presume?" Taelandra nodded. "Good girl. She will lead them to our resistance. We are small, but we will not allow this Colovian warlord to sack our city."

"Your resistance?"

"People call us the Bloody Oaks, though the name is inappropriate for we would never sully the great tree with crimson. We fight for the freedom of those in County Chorrol. You are a Blade; it is your business to know these things."

Indeed it was. The Blades had always been the eyes and ears of the Empire, but since there had been no Emperor for a decade… "I had heard the name," Taelandra claimed, based on a half-formed memory of a conversation she had once had with an ancient brother at the Priory. "You are Rallus Odiil?"

"I was," he said simply. "My father and brother were murdered by the warlord's men because they would not cede our farm to his power." He touched the wound to his cheek. "I got this trying to avenge their deaths and then they left me for dead. Follow me." He followed the road eastwards until he came to what looked like the shell of a once prosperous farm. "My home," he mumbled. There were two mounds of freshly dug earth outside the house.

The sound of hooves from further along the road made the woman bristle with fear while Rallus only loosened the hidden sword in its sheath and gestured for her to step back against the house. Four horses came into view, white by the look of them. The riders did not appear to be any threat, but the Imperial man did not let his guard down.

"Excuse me," asked one of the riders, still on horseback as they reined in next to Taelandra and Rallus. She – the Blade assumed she was a woman - wore a green hooded robe that covered her entire body save her hands, which were deathly pale. "We were wondering if this was the road to Weynon Priory."

The jaw of the hardened Imperial set. "What business do you have there?" His hand slipped underneath his cloak subtly, barely making the fabric move.

"We wish to make contact with the Blades. We were sent there from the Imperial City by one of the guards." The speaker this time was a Redguard boy with braided hair and a sword on his hip that had never seen battle, judging by the fact that it was not even dented. "We are survivors from Kvatch."

Rallus allowed his expression to soften, but did not lower his guard. "I'm afraid that Weynon Priory has fallen under the control of a Colovian warlord named Titus Mede," he told them.

A Breton girl with fiery hair growled at her companions. "I told you this was a damn waste of time," she snapped. She looked uncomfortable sitting upon the horse and clung to the saddle until her knuckles turned white. "We should have gone to bloody Cloud Ruler Temple like I told you after we left that stupid guard behind!"

"What business do you have with the Blades?" Taelandra asked, her curiosity spiking.

"We wish to know what happened to the Hero of our town," the green-robed woman explained without a pause. "The Blades of old were eyes and ears for the Emperor. We figured that if they were still formed then we would be able to ask them where her companion had fled to."

The Blade remembered the companion of the Hero of Kvatch, though she had never met the man. An Argonian and a sharpshooter with a bow and arrows fletched green who had escaped hanging in the Imperial City for the murder of High Chancellor Ocato due to having friends in the right places. Even the Blades had not been able to figure out who had freed him, though they had clearly been skilled and had access to elite resources.

"Grandmaster Steffan was the person we were told to ask for," interjected a Bosmer who looked as though he had caught some disease that turned his skin grey and who avoided meeting the gaze of anyone around him.

"Steffan is in Cloud Ruler, yes, but the Blades will not give away sensitive information to just anybody who knocks upon their gates asking for it. The man you seek was pivotal to the ending of the Oblivion Crisis and as such a great asset to the Empire should war strike again." She did not mention that he had been notoriously clumsy and had, at one stage, reportedly killed an ancient lich by accident. However his skills at evading death and his prestige with words would prove beyond useful should they ever have need of him.

The fiery-haired Breton girl spoke again: "My aunt was Sacha Renault."

Taelandra frowned. Captain Renault had been a great leader who had died defending the Emperor on the day he died; she did not realise that the woman had had any family. "I do not wish to promise you that Grandmaster Steffan will speak with you, however if you attempt to go armed with that piece of information there is a small chance you may at least be granted admission to the Temple."

"Thank you!" said the green-robed girl enthusiastically, nudging her horse in the ribs so that it would walk on.

"I would not go that way, if I were you," Rallus told her calmly. "Unless you wish to be captured, beaten and raped until they decide you are no longer worth the sport they gain from you and thus kill you. I would suggest the Silver Road over the Orange Road. You are less likely to die by that path, though you must still be wary. County Chorrol is no place for adventurers such as yourselves who have not yet been bloodied and are clearly ill-armed. This place is like a parasite upon the skin of Cyrodiil and I would strongly advise you to never set foot in this area again if you value your skin." Taelandra was astounded that he could talk of such brutality in such a calm manner in the presence of people barely older than children. "You have not chosen a good time to be searching for truth, kids," the Imperial sneered. "At this rate the only truth you're gonna find is gonna be six feet under."

* * *

><p><em>Author Note: So, I can only apologise that this chapter took something close to three months to write. There have been a combination of factors to my slowness, everything from extreme and total writing block to the fact that I have in the past month sat nine major A-level exams and still have two more to complete before I am free.<em>

_This chapter is, I suppose, darker than its predecessors. DualKatanas said the story was boring him, so I decided to burn County Chorrol. Why? Because Chorrol is the one city I never went into the details of during Brothers in Arms._

_But, rest assured that I am alive and shall try my best not to leave you waiting for three months for another update, seeing as my exams finish on Friday. On a plus note, I turned eighteen during the past three months. Wow. I'm an adult now. Scary thought :P_


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